Thursday, April 22 2021

Dear Journal,

Happy Thursday, people. Almost to the end of the work week, just hang in there. At least the weather is starting to take a turn for the best. Our morning of random April snowfall had me a little concerned, but we can just chalk that one up to Midwestern weather weirdness.

Sip. How you feeling today? I'm having a hard time warming up this morning. After waking up I was relieved to see that most of my morning routine was finished ahead of time. I got on a nice roll last night with cleaning the house, and as an act of charity for my groggy morning self I left everything pretty much idiot proof. This morning all I had to do was take the dogs out, feed Krang, and brew some coffee.

Minnie is starting to feel a little more routine now. Through trial and error, Marissa and I have found that she gets too distracted to do her business if Ollie and Ziggy join her outside. So now I let the big dogs out as normal with Minnie tucked under my arm. While Ollie and Ziggy are scarfing down their food, I escort Minnie to the backyard so she can do her business solo. Marissa mixes Minnie's food ahead of time, so all I have to do is add water and break up the meaty goop with a fork.

Minnie's love for chewing things has forced some lifestyle changes. She has already claimed a laptop charger and Marissa's phone charger. Add to that body count one more phone charger, as I discovered while climbing into bed last night. I must have spent at least five minutes wiggling the cable thinking something was wrong with my phone, and then I spotted just a few tiny teeth marks. Now, we're ordering extra phone and laptop chargers, and we try to leave them up high and out of reach during the day.

Other random updates - Miles is breaking into that golden age of messy toddler eating. He's old enough to eat whatever we're eating as long as it's cut up into small pieces, and letting him go to town on foods like avocado and spaghetti makes for funny pictures. I think his metabolism just went into high gear. He's still drinking milk and eating fortified baby food just as before, but on top of that he just gets a random finger food version of our dinner.

Minnie's ears started flopping again, and so she has to go back on the tape for a week. She wasn't very happy about that, and she needed extra attention to help her accept that harsh reality.

We noticed that whenever Minnie drinks from the water bowl, she stands with her front feet in Ollie's bowl. Sometimes she trips while trying to climb out. We're baffled at why she feels the need to do that, there's plenty of room to stand along the fridge door.

A lot of new friends were added to the fish tank yesterday. Marissa, with late birthday money burning a hole in her amazon account, pulled the trigger on some new corals and anemones. Rodney was pushed to his creative limits when he had to come up with seven new names to join classics such as Champion, Hole Puncher, and _Seapole. There's a lot of new characters to keep track of, and I learned yesterday that anemones can even move around.

I'll need another pass at these names, but somewhere in this mix is Lankinen, Treetop, and Pop.

It was a long, full day yesterday. Another day of attending conference talks, the first of which was Pitt's "How to make your own Mayonnaise" instructional. Rodney and I tuned in from the breakfast table.

"This take only about two minutes to throw together," laughed Pitt. After a brief demo, he used the rest of the time to make a grilled cheese, comparing a sandwich grilled in butter against a sandwich grilled in the mayonnaise he just made. Before heading upstairs for the day, I tried out my own batch in our kitchen. I wasn't as diligent about measuring things out, but after only a million swishes with my little metal whisk, a pale yellow mayonnaise finally came together. I'll use the egg beater next time.

Yesterday was my turn to be a friendly face at the conference. I led a "table for six" lunch with five other employees at the company. We spanned across San Francisco, Madison, and Montreal. We had some good laughs going around answering ice breaker questions.

I joined a Zoom breakout trivia game. Our group, the Belligerent Bumble Bees, put up a good fight, but in the end we fell off the leader board and into the middle of the pack. Call it a nitpick, but some of the questions challenged my own definition of "trivia". How many hairs are on the average human body? What was Trip Advisor's most popular destination in 2018? How many stores does Starbucks own globally?

It's 3300 stores, for the record. I'm kidding, it's 33,000. Actually it's 33 billion stores. Just kidding, it was actually around 33,000. Notice how no matter how many zeros I add it doesn't really make the fact that much more amazing. What am I comparing it to, the number of global coffee shops that I own?

That's what I got today. Have a great Thursday everyone.