Chickens and Eggs

My contracting manager has given all of us the day off tomorrow for Veteran’s Day, so I’ve had a lot to get done today in anticipation of that, which means this post is going to be shortish. I know earlier in the week I was reflecting once again on how my current boss is one of the least touchy-feely supervisors I (or I expect anyone) has ever had, but sometimes that is an unreservedly good thing. There’s a certain amount of money associated with our contract which is discretionary, and our boss could use it to take us all out for ice cream or do other little morale-building things on a regular basis, but usually what he does is save it up until there’s a federal (but non-company) holiday and pay for each of us to get a bonus vacation day that day. It’s not very personal and doesn’t involve the whole team sitting around bonding with one another, but I still say it’s frighteningly good for morale.

Anyway, my wife normally works Fridays but she has some extra vacation time to burn before year’s end, and she was planning on taking November 11th as a personal day before I found out my fellow contractors and I were being so gifted with free time. So that means we find ourselves with a weekday off together AND both of the kids scheduled to go to daycare, so it’s going to be like a six-hour staycation and we’ll have to see just how much decadence we can cram into the time between dropping the kids off and picking them up. (Lunch, then Buffy the Vampire Slayer on dvd, then nap? Or Buffy-nap-late lunch? Oh the possibilities!)

Speaking of the kids, the little guy has been amusing me lately as he expands his repertoire of conversational techniques. He still asks “why?” a lot, as much as you would expect any inquisitive three-year-old to, I reckon, but recently he’s begun to incorporate “what would you say (or do) if …?” Much like its predecessor “why”, the “what would happen” seems to be split almost 50/50 between genuine requests for information and set-ups to hear an answer he already knows perfectly well. I just find it interesting to see him flipping around and looking at things from the opposite direction. He used to see effects and express curiosity about their causes; now he imagines hypothetical causes and wonders about what the resulting effects would be. Not that he thinks about things in remotely those terms, I’m sure, but as I said, it’s amusing to me.