In the five years we’ve been here Canada Post has never inspected our mail box, because if they had, we would’ve got this notice that the mailbox post is too tall long before now. It took them five years to inspect it, and we have 10 days to lower it. If that’s not bureaucracy, I don’t know what is. HA.

So I pulled the post out of the ground, cut it down to the required height, no trouble. All good.

Today the mail deliverer left a thank you note in the box. Shortening the post made her workplace less hazardous. I’m going to assume they’ve also hung posters of my face all around Canada Post offices with the words HERO underneath. I probably won’t be able to walk down the streets anymore without being recognized. It’s the cross I bear.

It’s new sump pump day! Celebrate by sleeping through the night without hearing clickclickclickclickclick or brrrrrrrrrrrrrssssssshhhhhhhppppttttttttt or brrrrsht THUNK THUNK coming from your (not nearly old enough) pos sump pump every 30 seconds all night long. May all your basements be dry. HAPPY NEW SUMP PUMP DAY!

The girls have been watching Ghostbusters in 1/2 hour chunks before bedtime for the past few nights, and now the 3 year old is periodically repeating the line “Okay, who brought the dog?” and I’m pretty sure that’s the best thing ever.

An attractive young couple asked me what kids are like on snow days. Snow is pure and clean and beautiful. It paws playfully at tree branches, and caresses the corners of the yard. It’s peaceful. It’s calm. It’s the dream of greeting card aesthetes. Snow Day Kids, on the other hand, are wound up Filipino gamecocks, fiercely tearing at each other’s eyes and feathers with razor sharp beaks, and claws. They’re flapping, and pecking and spitting, and trying to turn each other inside out, and then I win 100 dollars on the spunky short kid with the weird beak because NOBODY thought that kid would survive. If there’s a snow storm outside, there’s a shit storm inside, and EVERYBODY IS GROUNDED UNTIL 9:00 AM TOMORROW I SWEAR TO GOD GET BACK IN YOUR ROOM.

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.

Douglas Adams

…profanity and obscenity entitle people who don’t want unpleasant information to close their eyes and ears to you.

Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

That and “know your audience” were the two morsels of fatherly wisdom I served up last night. BOOM MOTHERFUCKERS.

I have this general rule that the thing a company became famous for is the only thing you should buy from them. Nowhere is this more true than kids products. For example, Disney makes good movies, but lousy bed sheets, ugly lamps, and questionable toys. I haven’t read a single book from a toy maker that was worth the paper it was printed on.

Apparently Curious George isn’t a monkey at all, but a chimp. And Hello Kitty isn’t a cat. I need to lie down.

If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.

Don Draper, Mad Men

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.

George Carlin

I think they’re agreeing with each other.

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.

Joseph Heller, Catch-22