Farewell, Young Man

Image by brentdanley via Flickr

My wife and I consider ourselves fortunate to live in a great neighborhood generously appointed with trails, parks, playgrounds, water fountains, a swimming pool, and even our own elementary school.  It’s a wonderful place to raise kids, and we have three little ones of our own.  Our next door neighbors were the epitome of the neighborhood.  Not long after I met them, I held their baby daughter in my arms.  Their son, Samuel, was a well-mannered and happy young lad who always called me “Sir”.  He loved to sing and had a lead role in a community theater production.  His favorite subject in school was Chinese.  His father was a coach on his football team and once spent a frigid night under the stars with Samuel lying in the backyard in sleeping bags.  His mother bought us pajamas and a sweater for our first-born baby.  Last night, I learned that the couple had split.  Samuel had already moved out of state with his sister and mother, before I could tell him, “You are a good kid.  Your parents both love you.  Love them back.  Don’t lose faith in yourself or others.  Life is not always fair.  Hurt will heal.  Farewell, young man.”

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Decoder for Cryptic 5/30 Blog Post

Ole, Short for Our Little Einstein

A proud father of 3 little ones ages 26 months and younger, I mention them often in posts, as they are central to everything in my life.  Spending 4 days alone with them at home (not 3 men and a baby, but rather 1 man and 3 babies!) over this Memorial Day weekend was an amazing opportunity that every parent should have–to get to know them not skin deep, not personality deep, but soul deep.  BUT I DIGRESS!  The intent of this post is to decode the brief 5/30 post that may not have been interpreted fully by some blog readers.  My 26-month-old son, let’s call him Ole for purposes of the child protection program, is scary smart.  When Ole is not navigating iTunes, Pandora, YouTube, and several other apps on my iPhone with amazing confidence and speed, he is exploring new apps.  On 5/30, he apparently decided to take the WordPress app for a spin while Daddy made lunch for him.  The image you see in the 5/30 post is his highchair tray, and the message he typed translates to “I love squiggly noodles with cheese.”  He made the post without any help from Daddy, who only learned of it from puzzled readers.  There you have it!

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[If you don’t quite understand the meaning of this post, you are not alone!  Check out this link to another post, where the image and text above is decoded: http://wp.me/p1pRY1-d6]

Modern Day Stonehenge in Our Den

Our Stonehenge, Half of Original Height

Our son is just 26 months old, but he will soon be smarter than his Dad, no doubt.  As any parent can attest, adults get dumber by the second, and kids learn at a frightening pace.  Given these opposing IQ trajectories, it is no wonder that teenagers are all much smarter than their parents.  Anyway, this leads to the story of Stonehenge in our den.  As my wife took care of our other little ones yesterday, our son was hard at work on his project.  Without any encouragement from earthlings, he unloaded the bookshelf in the den and proceeded to construct a meticulously aligned tower o’ books.  The pictured tower is only half of its original height, as my wife was afraid the full-height tower (as tall as our boy himself) would fall over and hurt him.  After he went to bed, I inspected his creation.  With incredible precision, he had somehow gotten small books way down toward the bottom to balance much larger books above them.  I am certain there is some advanced explanation to the tower–alignment with the planets, time keeping with shadows cast by the sun, or communication with extraterrestrials, but I am too dumb to interpret it.

Fodder Fodder Everywhere! CONTRIBUTE!

What started out as an experiment–me blogging random musings on life at the urging of family, friends, and others–has turned out to be fun.  The posts are short, and they take me just a few minutes each to crank out.  The bigger challenge is choosing the best topics for the posts.  Sure, there is plenty of fodder out there to last a lifetime, but the best raw material comes from readers.  Just ask Scott Adams, the comic strip writer behind Dilbert, a strip that pokes fun at the business world.  His readers have kept him going everyday for years.  I am looking for topics that inspire us to think about the strange, ridiculous, wacky, frustrating, humorous, or wondrous aspects of everyday life.  Whereas rubbing shoulders with a celebrity might be considered a brush with fame, consider this your opportunity to have a brush with obscurity–some guy who nobody knows and probably never will.  In exchange for your contributions, I will give you a SHOUT OUT when I use the topic you submit so that everybody reading this blog will know you (first name and city/state only).  Please provide your city/state with your submissions, and thanks in advance!

Ideas may be submitted directly to me at dan.huse@yahoo.com.

Is this my calling?

I sure as hell hope so!  Like a lot of people, I have spent my life pursuing happiness and fulfillment in places near and far.  We have all heard a similar expression, “Find something you love to do, and BLAH BLAH BLAH.”  OK, so “BLAH” isn’t exactly how it goes, but the point is that we just need to find what we love, and the rest will take care of itself.  Well, I love to write, and I have heard friends, family, and colleagues tell me for years that I should blog.  OK, I am blogging!  THIS IS MY BLOG, OH LORD!  NOW SHOW ME THE WAY!  Maybe I am expecting too much too soon.  Anyway, I hope you will tune in regularly (or better yet, subscribe over on the right bar!), as the marketer in me thinks that you will help to make my dreams come true.