Simple Pleasures

How rarely do we stop to enjoy the simple pleasures in life? Even less frequently, how often do we share that emotion, joy, and experience with others? The sharing of an experience can sometimes be as enjoyable as the experience itself. This is actually the entire model that the bloggosphere is based on, is it not? Living life through the shared experiences and emotions of others?

Last night I experienced a rare moment when someone else’s joy, and how they expressed it, made me experience as much if not more joy for completely different reasons.

During the day my wife had made a cheesecake as a gift for her father’s birthday. Although she declared it a “failure” and promptly started looking for a new recipe, we were not going to throw out the baby with the bathwater. I opened a can of blueberry pie filling so we could enjoy the “spoils” of the day. I looked around to see if anyone was watching and took one big lick off the lid, but Mischa caught me and demanded a lick for herself. I obliged and she took a health lick from the lid as well.

After some pause, her eyes grew wide, her smile beamed, she put her hand to her mouth as if she had just been told a shocking secret, and proclaimed “It tastes like paradise in my mouth!”

I couldn’t stop from letting out a laugh, not at her, but rather because she verbalized the emotion we all feel with a particularly sweet indulgence. It certainly was the exact feeling I was having at the time savoring the great taste that only blueberry pie filling can provide!

So here’s to the simple pleasures of life, “ruined” desserts, and a daughter that I wouldn’t trade for the world!

Do It....Right?

The best of intentions can often be used for the worst of justifications. Here I haven’t blogged for weeks and the only reason is that I haven’t found the time to download the pictures from my camera and have them available to me as I write. Well, I finally downloaded the pictures from the camera but then failed to write anything over the weekend.

The pictures cover everything from Joshua’s birthday in November, Thanksgiving in South Carolina with loads of 1st and 2nd cousins, Christmas of course, pictures of the scale with me at 219 lbs and a BMI under 30 officially marking the day I was no longer “obese”, and close up pictures at Caleb’s first Pine Wood Derby car (ok I helped a little). I will eventually post and blog about some of those pictures but for now I am contemplating my inaction based on my intentions.

I find myself often justifying not doing anything in the name of “wanting to do it right”. Be it not having the right tool, part, ingredient, “feeling up to it”, enough time, or, most commonly, enough desire for the subsequent consequence, mankind is notorious for finding reasons NOT to do things instead of reasons to “Just Do It”. Yet in life we celebrate those that just flat out find a way to make things happen. Did MacGyver EVER have the right tool? The guy could do more with a paperclip, a gum wrapper, and a watch battery than most men can do with Home Depot, Radio Shack, and Wal-Mart at their disposal. The point was not HOW it got done but rather, THAT it got done. (One caveat here is to apply this to taking action, not on household wiring. I am not advocating cheating, shortcuts, or otherwise undercutting one’s integrity, just getting off of your butt instead of resigning yourself to “failure.”)

I once had a coach that told me, “If you try, and fall flat on your face, at least you moved forward 6 feet.” There are many clichés of this subject that we have all heard, “If you are not moving forward, you are moving backward”, “When they say sink or swim there is a reason they say sink first”, or “That will go over like a pregnant pole-vaulter”. (ok, so that last one is a bit of a stretch but it was the most common phrase I think I heard growing up so it has to apply to just about anything, right?)

I can look back in my life and some of the most fulfilling "projects" I have undertaken were only undertaken after much self delay (i.e. building the shed in Silver City, tape and texturing my home there as well, or getting my Master’s Degree). I look back and say, “Why did I put off doing this in the first place?”

The point of my diatribe here was just to get you thinking about the projects you have been putting off for whatever “reason” and help you get off square one. (One could argue I was just dealing with writers block but we won’t go there.)

So, what are you going to tackle today? (<--Unabashed comment whoring here!)

The Mind of a Child

At first glance you may wonder what these two pictures have in common. To the common eye water is the only similarity. But in the eyes of a four year old, that is more than enough.

The first image is a screenshot from Joshua’s video game, Alphabet Park Adventure, on his V-smile gaming console. The point of this particular game is to steer your inflatable rubber duck (partially concealed by the large letter H) across the screen matching your duck's letter with the picture that starts with the same letter. Not much of a challenge. However, when I entered the room, my 4 year old appeared engrossed in the game and was frantically guiding his duck all over the screen obviously having added an additional element to the game.

We now come to the second picture above. It is a screenshot from Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean – Dead Man’s Chest in which the Kraken, unleashed by Davy Jones, is attacking a ship. We recently rented the movie which Joshua enjoyed thoroughly and he renamed it Jack Sparrow. (Can you tell who his hero in the movie was?)

Back to the scene I walked in on, Joshua then turned to his 20 month old sister sitting beside him and warned her in his lowest, scariest, and most dramatic voice, “BEWARE THE KRAKEN!” He then proceeded to float around the screen letting out a constant stream of “whoaaaaaa”s as if a monster could pop up at any second and bring his alphabetically inclined “vessel” into the briny deep!

Of course, me and my bad puns, I returned the warning telling him that what he really needed to watch out for was the Quacken! But hey, he passed the level so if my son wants to motivate himself to learn with the help of a giant mythical creature, who am I to argue?