Odds and Ends

I resisted it as long as I could...but Count me now among the young professionals who work too much. I’ve had a rough few weeks, and that looks to continue this week. How some people make a life out of this kind of schedule on a regular basis, I don’t know. But they are to be both congratulated and pitied.

Here are some highlights of what you've missed the past few weeks:

• A back injury Mother’s Day weekend (from playing basketball) that left me near bed ridden and hobbling on the big day.* Michelle still managed to get some nice gifts, and I even stayed home from church with Jared. Given the degree of difficulty of a cripple watching his 2 year old son for three hours alone during one his most active times of the day, it almost made up for me not taking care of the other things she’s come to expect of me on Mother’s Day, but then not really. (Still, I bet I fared better than another not too removed from us who purportedly decided on his own that he wasn’t going to do anything for his wife on Mother’s Day – since he figures it was a holiday Hallmark must have invented to generate more revenue. Perhaps your inclination too is that he maybe should’ve sought out a second opinion or two before he decided take a stand against materialism on his wife’s holiday.)**


• I took my first deposition, having never even seen a deposition before. I spent most of the time trying to convey anything but the impression that it was my first deposition. I'm sure that made my errors seem all the more like foolishness. Only afterward did all my superiors let me in on the dirty little secret of depositions: many, if not most, deponents lie, and many times there’s nothing you can do about it.
  
• I have been craving peanut M&M’s for weeks. And yet I cannot bring myself to spend $2.44 on a 1 lb. bag at Target. (We are under new budgetary constraints and, what's more, I'd surely eat the whole bag within an hour). On the other hand, the regular 50 cent size bag would hardly be big enough to whet my appetite (and besides, the 50 cent bag costs 65 cents and Ralphs). It’s one of those difficult situations in life that I don’t see any easy solution for. In the meantime, though, I’ve managed to suggest a bag of peanut M&Ms as the ideal gift just about anytime Michelle has asked for my input: birthday? Peanut M&Ms. Graduation gift? Peanut M&Ms. Baby Shower? A nice heaping bag of Peanut M&Ms. Seriously, rather than spending $50 on clothing, gift certificates, or DVDs, who wouldn’t be absolutely blown away to instead get $50 worth of Peanut M&Ms?


• Jared has transitioned from a crib to a bed. To give him incentive to nap in the bed, we offered him a prize: take seven naps in your bed and we’ll make you a cake and throw a party. He did it. So last Saturday, at his insistence, we had a purple cake (with candles) and watched the Lion King. Jared wanted us to sing him “Happy Birthday to You” but Michelle, sensing the moment, opted instead to lead to two of us in a chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Up until then I didn’t think anyone actually sang that song anymore.
• One of my favorite days of the month has recently become the day the electricity bill arrives. After years of leaving our main computer on all the time we started to wonder if something was wrong when our neighbor's electricity bills were often nearly $20 lower than ours. Since we've started turning that computer off when we don't use it, our electricity bill has honestly gone down 33%. (For the last few days I've been trying to build up the courage to propose to Michelle the idea that we earmark some of those saved funds for peanut M&Ms -- or maybe even create an M&M category in our monthly budget. I'm just waiting to catch her in a moment of weakness).


• I made time for the season finales of “American Idol” and “Lost” last week. It might not be safe to admit this, but I actually voted (for the first time) for Katharine McPhee last week. The saving point has to be that I only really did it to spite Michelle--who thought Taylor deserved to win.


• And lastly, I had enough time away from work today that we went swimming for the first time this year, and found time to fire up the grill to cook some tender steaks. I can’t be sure whether it’s my mastery of the grill or Michelle’s perfect preparation of the meat, but steaks have rarely tasted better. Adding to that grilled corn on the cob, watermelon, and nacho cheese Doritos (as well as a Klondike bar for the post family home evening treat) and you have yourself a Memorial Day to envy. The only thing that might've made it just a bit nicer is if we’d had some peanut M&Ms.

*By the way, I get almost no sympathy for my basketball injuries any more – no matter how debilitating. Michelle seems to have become desensitized to them. Before I would come home hobbling and she’d rush to my aid pleading “Is there anything I can do?” Now she just takes one look at me and jokes that I'd better not waste any sick time at work for it. It truly is a sad state of affairs in the Clark household.

**In the interest of full disclosure, I am the guy who tried to argue, unsuccessfully, that my wife, at 5 months pregnant, was not technically a mother yet and thus I was under no celebratory obligations.