Today I learned:
1. Babysitting: When my wife is out and I am taking care of the kids I still call it babysitting. Something doesn’t feel right about it, but I can’t seem to come up with anything that rolls off the tongue more easily. There are the obvious options, like “taking care of my kids,” but why go 6 syllabus when you can get your message across in 4? Admittedly this habit has a few detractors, including a Facebook group with over 400K members but looking through the comments there I see no one offering me up a viable alternative. I suppose it’s easier to hit “like” and return to Farmville than to put some meaningful thought into solving an important problem such as this one.
2. Christmas lights: Every neighbourhood has the guy that leaves his lights up year round. Icicles hanging from the roof and Rudolph sitting in the front yard in August. It’s just lazy. I am not that guy, and I have always looked down on him. Now that we are into January our christmas tree is gone and today it was time to pack the lights into the garage until next Christmas.
When setting them up I run the power from the light socket outside our front door, so when I was done the last task was to put back the regular bulb. As I screwed in the bulb it occurred to this one bulb costs more than running 850 Christmas lights on 17 low wattage LED strings. For a fleeting moment I considered being that guy. I mean, why not? It would save me a few cents a year.
Ultimately the need to stay organized won out . I just couldn’t be that guy, so I finished the job. There was still a lesson there though: I learned that guy might not just be lazy. He could also be cheap.
two things i learned today 