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I’m writing about censorship today.

A couple weeks ago the internet was ablaze with SOPA and PIPA and other acronyms. Everyone rallied together and defeated the big bad bills that would have let government direct who can say what.

I’m not talking about that kind of censorship.

I censor what comes into my house, what my kids see and hear.

Maybe a better word would be filter.

Or discern.

It is important for parents to protect their children.

People use the term shelter like it is a bad thing. Shelter is like anything else – too much of it is bad, and too little of it is bad too. Kids need to be sheltered for a while, until they are strong enough to withstand that from which the shelter was protecting them.

I like the analogy of the greenhouse. Why do seedlings need to be in a greenhouse? The greenhouse is there to protect them from the elements until they have grown enough to handle them.
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True to the subtitle of this blog, I am providing some random thoughts to start 2012.

• If you give a million monkeys a million typewriters, you’ll end up with rough approximation of the internet. But nothing close to Shakespeare.
• Some say the dishwasher is half empty. Others say the dishwasher is half full. I say that either way there’s a chore that needs to be done.
• It seems like everyone has a breakfast nook, but nobody has a breakfast cranny. My next house is going to have a breakfast cranny

In the course of a calendar year, there will be good days at work and bad days at work.

Sometimes, which is which is random – you won’t know ahead of time if it’s going to be a good day or a bad day.

Other times, you know what it’s going to be, based on what is due or which meeting is scheduled for that day.

Over the course of many years in the workplace, I know I can count on these 3 days to be enjoyable.

• Before or after July 4th

  Depending on what day of the week this holiday falls, people take either the day before or the day after the 4th off. That means a bunch of people are not at work. And that means that you can get done the things that you think are important to get done, without interrupts or re-prioritizations.

• After Halloween

  The reason this day is good is not because of fewer people. The usual number of people still show up to work this day. No, what makes me look forward to this day is the amount of chocolate that enters the building.

  This year, a co-worker brought bags and bags of chocolate because he overestimated the number of trick-or-treaters that would visit his new house. He didn’t want to have to eat all of the extra candy, so he brought it into work. I was glad to help him get rid of it.

• Before Christmas

  We get a full week off work between Christmas and New Year’s, so everyone is winding things down before the start of Christmas break. That means no one is going to ask you to start anything significant. It’s a relaxing time.

  And if you have a good boss, like I had my first year in this job, he will come around some time between lunch and normal quitting time to wish you a merry Christmas. The exchange went a little something like this:
  Boss: Are you doing actual work, or are you just filling time until the end of the day?
  Underling: I’ve finished all the assigned tasks…
  Boss: Go home then, and have a good break.
  Underling: Thanks!

  It doesn’t happen every year, but being dismissed early is a nice touch of the holiday spirit.

Then Joshua dismissed the people, each to his inheritance.

Joshua 24:28

My wife posted a this on Facebook, so a couple of you might have already seen this. Since I’m not on Facebook I figured I would share it with the general internet audience.

Here is what the sky in front of our house looked like a week or two ago:

Thanks to our almost-neightbor Erin, we now know that such an occurrence is called a murmuration of starlings.

And since Gamma likes chasing birds, he was excited to see them.

Here is what our front lawn looks like when the birds land:

I stitched two photos together for that one. Click on it to enlarge it.

They don’t stay for long though, especially when we open the front door and Gamma runs out to get them.

Just a few random thoughts this morning, related to some aspects of parenthood.

• It’s fun to go out in the yard with the kids and play catch. But to get to that point, you have to play many games of throw.
• For many people, daylight saving time is a chance for an extra hour of sleep. But for parents of small children, DST is a chance for an extra hour of playtime in the morning. Those kids don’t care what the clock says. Whether that’s good or bad depends on your attitude.
• Once you’ve successfully completed the task of clipping an infant’s pinkie toenails, you can try something less stressful – like open-heart surgery.

Here’s some more schoolwork. They asked for a pattern, and Alpha found one.

That’s my boy!

Tip: If you’re putting together a classroom assignment, aim for directions that are more specific rather than vague. Ask the question that you really want answered. “Describe a numerical pattern that you see.” might have been better than “What patterns do you see in the chart?”

If I were me, I would have gone with “All the numbers end in 0”.

We’ve been having a nice fall here. There was a chilly spell of about a week or so, but it’s been on the warm side since then.

One of the nice days was the day of the half-marathon. It was right near Lake Michigan, so we stopped by the beach after the expo the afternoon before the race. The weather in general was nice, but the beach was a bit windy.

To get to the beach, you have to go over a sand dune. It’s a moderately-sized dune, but big enough to be impressive to young kids. This is the view after climbing from the parking lot to the top of the hill:

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