Friday Hodgepodge

Four Things

Several years ago, I decided that each Friday, I'd take a break from the negativity of the news cycle and make a list of four things I find interesting or enjoyable. I still do that most weeks. But recently, I started ending each day (or starting the next morning) by making a list of three wins, big or small, from the day. Here are four of those from the past month, excluding (a) the lack of a visit from Hurricane Dorian, (b) my good time hustling art with my son, and (c) my discovery of a way to finally get the garage clear of moving boxes...

1. On the anniversary of my father's death, I remembered, "I was very lucky to have Pops as a dad."

Image by Jan Kolar, via Unsplash, license.

2. While we were visiting with my brother in another part of Florida, I took a look at the house with a Nest camera, and heard an Echo/Alexa alarm going off. We used to use the Nest cameras as child monitors and I remembered that it's possible to speak into the phone app and be heard through a small speaker built into the camera. So I tried to silence the alarm by saying, "Alexa, stop!"

It didn't work, probably because the sound quality from the Nest camera isn't great and it was sitting across the living room from the Echo. It was fun to try, though.

3. For ages, I have had a chronic problem completing my weekly review, during which I had scheduled looking at all my project tracking files.

So I set aside an entire Friday afternoon to accomplish this.

If by "fail," you mean I still didn't make it through them all, I failed. But I did get through quite a few, and more important, I saw a better way to do this part of the weekly review: Just do a few each week and note where I left off. Pick up there the next week and repeat.

Now, I know I'll at least look at everything from time to time, no matter how many things I am tracking.

4. We took the kids to Disney last weekend. At one point, while standing in line, I heard my six-year-old son's voice. He was frustrated and upset about something.

That something was that he'd managed to trap his arm between the metal frame of a movie poster and a guard rail.

I tried moving his arm vertically, in case he'd inserted it through a slightly wider part of the gap, then tried to pull out from a narrow part. No dice.

So quickly I am still amazed, I realized that (a) I needed to lubricate his arm, and (b) that water is a lubricant.

"Stop panicking," I said to my son. "Do you have some water," I asked my wife.

Using the bottle she produced from the bowels of her backpack, I moistened his arm and immediately got it out, earning applause from a foreign tourist behind us.

-- CAV

P.S.: It was fun reviewing my wins for the month. This has been a part of my day I look forward to, and I highly recommend this practice.

Updates

Today: Corrected wording in Items 2 and 3.