Quote of the day

Brendan: "Can we watch a movie in the car?"

Erin: "No, we don't need to watch a movie. Let's just talk."

Brendan: "That's so 1990's."

I'm sure Ringo Starr never had this problem

I have a love-hate relationship with Silly Putty. It fascinates me from a science/chemistry standpoint and is a great stress-reliever at times. I even have a Silly Putty egg in my top desk drawer at work, and often will stretch and pull the stuff while I'm on the phone. But the kids know that one of my biggest pet peeves is finding empty Silly Putty containers around the house, because an empty Silly Putty container means that somewhere else in the house there's Silly Putty stuck to something. (I hold the same disdain for magic marker caps for much the same reasoning.)

Molly's been playing around with Silly Putty lately, and fortunately gets it back into its ovoid home most of the time. Unfortunately last night, she was thwarted in her attempts to put away the Silly Putty properly as it had become adherent to the surface she had smoothed it out on- the rubber-coated drum head of the Guitar Hero drum controller. To her credit, she came to report the situation right away, but in a somewhat comical exchange, was pointing to the family room because she couldn't get the words out to explain what had happened. (This condition, which I refer to as "Fonzi's palsy"- named so because of Arthur Fonzarelli's inability to say the words "I'm sorry"- is quite common in the preschool population.)

It was clear immediately that the Silly Putty was not going to be removed easily. Cooling it with an ice pack for 20 minutes or so made it a little less pliable, but still didn't get it to chip off as I hoped it might. So I sat down, and for the next 60 minutes or so, slowly scraped away pieces of Silly Putty with a razor blade until only a stain remained.

Molly was happy to see that she hadn't caused any permanent damage, and didn't bat an eye when I told her I was throwing the Silly Putty away. Hopefully any further attempts at Silly Putty play will involve just the Sunday Comics.

Housekeeping issues

I realize my pace of one post every few weeks has dropped readership to an all-time low, but after finally getting some spam-type comments, I'm having to beef up security around here just a little. You'll notice now that if you do choose to comment on a post, you'll have to enter a security word first before your comment can be posted. As for now, the comments aren't being moderated, so play nice.

Hopefully you'll see some more posts coming up in the next few weeks. I'm hoping to get back to about a twice weekly schedule by late December so as to keep the traffic from the post-Christmas letter bounce. But you're here now, which makes you special. You were always my favorite anyway.