Saturday Grab Bag of Infinitessimal Interest

Minor follow-up to this week's post about the deleterious effects of prolonged school closures: right about the time I was composing and posting that particular musing, the little guy was at home with the babysitter, and had gone up to his room to play unsupervised. This is to be expected (our sitter can't be in two places at once and there's a higher priority on keeping a watchful eye on the baby and the two-year-old) and normally it would be fine, but as it happened the little guy decided he would put his bedside table up on his bed, then climb onto the table, and pull down the plastic model planets suspended from the ceiling. Bad enough that this high-risk maneuver could have potentially resulted in serious traumatic injury to the little guy, but the planets were hung by nylon threads from little star-shaped thumbtacks, which were loosed from the ceiling and subsequently scattered around, some winding up on the bedroom floor immediately, others still connected to their threads for a while as the little guy carried the planets around, only to fall off on the stairs, or in the living room, &c.

Fortunately (which is a qualifier I rarely use in the context I'm about to describe here), the baby was in a very clingy mood when I got home, so I didn't let him crawl around on the floor much at all (or more accurately, he didn't let me let him). It was only after dinner, as we all went upstairs for bathtime, that I even became aware of the missing thumbtacks, which led to me juggling the baby between the bath and what I hoped were safe spaces while trying to spot sharp, pointy little choking hazards wherever they might have fallen. Nobody stepped on, swallowed, or punctured anything, thankfully. I found most of the thumbtacks before my wife got home, and once she was in the house and brought up to speed, she managed to locate the rest.

I know he's five, and I know by Thursday afternoon he was clearly going out of his mind with boredom, but dang. School had a delayed opening on Friday, but at least he got to go. Things can't get back to normal soon enough.

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Anyway, on to much more lightweight matters. When I was visiting my dad last weekend we got to talking about the Pick'em Pool and how we had both finished with ground floor (i.e., not quite basement) records. Dad then informed me that the organizer had extended picking season into the playoffs for a select few people. (I think I've mentioned before that my father and the Pick'em commish are old childhood friends, so I certainly don't begrudge that I didn't make the cut.) Since there are fewer games per weekend in the playoffs than in the regular season, in order to make things interesting the commish includes various prop bets; so not just picking the winner against the spread, but also picking who scores first, the over/under points total, and so on. All of this to set up Dad admitting that in the first week he had a perfect record, going 0-for-8 and getting every single pick wrong. He did ask if he could get a special prize for this. He was told no, not so much.

So, my abilities (lack thereof) in this realm may have a genetic component. More data will be collected next season!

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From the Vanity Plate Archive: Saw a car in the parking garage at the train station which had a vanity plate reading RN4BEER. The message, "RUN FOR BEER", is hardly difficult to discern, and not even all that random. I've known people who belong to social clubs that get together on the weekends, go for cross-country runs, and meet up at a predetermined watering hole destination when it's over. In other words, this is a thing people do, and the vanity plate was a very straightforward expression of that, unlikely to lend itself to wildly inappropriate misinterpretation (with the possible exception of "NURSE FOR BEER"? I don't even know how that would work.)

The only reason I mention this particular sighting is because the owner of the car also had installed a license plate holder which read ... "Will Run For Beer". And that is just too much, I mean, right? That's like being the guy who wears a sports jersey for a certain team and then additionally wears a ballcap for the same team in the identical color scheme. Like, we get it, guy. You're a big fan. Either one or the other of those accessories would have gotten the idea across. Both is overkill.