Patience.org

The difference between being and four and a half and three years older than that can be pretty marked.

While driving up Sixth Avenue last weekend, with the Empire State Building looming ever larger into view, M’s first cousin, once removed (to use the official terminology) gave us an apparently accurate and quite detailed synopsis of King Kong, which he’d recently seen.

About 30 secs into it, the younger cousin piped up, “he’s a big monkey!” which he later clarified to “a big gorilla,” after which the synopsis run-down continued.

I’m going to miss such innocence when it’s gone, I know it.

It’s always amusing – well it is to me, anyway – when corporate-speak butts heads with reality in spectacular ways. I face it every day in the IT industry, but have come to realize that the same self-important nonsense is prevalent in every industry.

Take this quote on February 8 from someone called Frank Williams, “We believe we couldn’t have picked a better time to move into this one organisation type structure, because the market is more and more asking for end-to-end solutions by a single supplier…These are very exciting times and this is a great opportunity to pull the UK organisation together.”

Thus says the bloke who recently took over as UK manager of Securitas, which was held up 13 days later to the tune of 50 million pounds ($87m), or thereabouts.

I guess the robbers were waiting for that single, end-to-end supplier thing to take effect so they could nick more dosh?

Well after what was apparently the fourth warmest January in New York City history, it was inevitable we’d get dumped on at some point. And last night/this morning we did. Obviosuly such an event can’t stop kids wanting to go out and run around, but we only got about 20 feet outside the door this morning before we had to stop because boy, was it deep.

There’s some pictures of the kids outside in it in the February 06 folder (as usual you’ll have to log in to see them so if you need a password etc, email us).

There’s also some general pictures of the neighborhood here for viewing without a password, like this one on the corner of our street and many many more that others have taken over at the Flickr NYC pool.

I, like thousands of others, use Google’s Gmail for certain things. It’s a good interface and has an excellent spam filter. Anyway part of what makes Gmail Gmail is its ability to search emails and also to mine the content of those emails to throw up news clips or other things it thinks are related to the content of the email.

I don’t take much notice of such things as I’m there to read email, not catch up on the news, but I couldn’t help noticing the odd things thrown up at the top of Gmail’s spam box. Most of them are recipes including Spam, you know, Hormel’s lovely canned meat product that used to be the main use of the word. Some of my favorites include:

Spam Fajitas – Serves 8, add extra salsa if desired [because just some salsa can't be enough can it?]
Creamy Spam Broccoli Casserole – Makes 8 servings
Vineyard Spam Salad – Combine grapes, spam, peapods and onions in large bowl [for the more adventurous among you spam lovers]
French Fry Spam Casserole – Bake 30-40 minutes [that has to have been dreamt up by an impoverished student]

but my favorite of all is…..
Ginger Spam Salad – Serves 1, refrigerate overnight

Serves 1? Who would have thought it? He could have got all his mates round to share in the ginger spam salad loveliness. Oh, I see.

Self-managing kids often seems like completely wishful thinking, especially at the end of a long weekend of childcare. but occasionally, they show signs of it, as he has over the past couple of weeks. He decided – exhibiting the autonomous type of self-improvment thinking you perhaps don’t think 4 year-olds are capable of – that it was time he started teaching himself to read in sentences. Not that we had negelected him and left him to his own devices – far from it! But reading in sentences is not explicitly taught at his pre-school.

So one day in January he started reading words, using phonetics to work out any words he didn’t grasp immediately ( occasionally asking for help, obviously) and stringing them together into sentences.

It was one of those spurts of development where the neurons seems to be firing off in greater numbers than normal. he’s also become very curiosu abotu cvalendras, years, days etc (he’s lknown his months and been able to tell us the date each morning for a few months now, thanks in part to the opening titles of the Daily Show, if we’re honest.

Makes us wonder what is next – I know you’re supposed to plan all these things out, but who does that really?