Mild Amusement

These days, I do a lot more cooking than I used to. As the Mild Wife has often pointed out, I should probably know how to cook some of my favorite dishes. Plus, we both enjoy the process, and I make a decent sous chef . In the process, there have been quite a few amusing stories. I can now pick out the ingredients in my food with better-than-zero odds, I get to plate the food however I want to , and we even managed to find some funny Amazon reviews in the process. Ultimately, the point is that cooking is an enjoyable process for the Mild Wife and me. I suspect that's a big chunk of the reason why we enjoy watching the Great British Baking Show . I fully realize that baking is not the same as cooking savory food, but it's still fun to see people create things. And in some ways, the fact that it's a different skill set makes it easier to sit back and watch. I am not realistically going to make royal icing any time soon, so it's fun to watch it appear when someone else...

I don't spend as much time with the kids at the daycare these days, so the little kid posts have been fewer and farther between. In fact, the last time I wrote one of these was a little over four years ago . As it so happens, many of the kids have been fairly young, so they haven't exactly been good at providing quote-worthy sound bites. However, they are still people, albeit little ones. That means that they have little personalities, little motivations, and do little things. And it's fun as all heck to watch those little people do those things. It's just plain awesome sometimes. In this case, one of the little munchkins is at about the age where he's learning to move around. He's got control of his head, he can sit up, and he's curious. That set of conditions tends to lead to bucking around and jolting in an attempt to get at things in one's general vicinity. After all, you're stable, and you've got things you want to see and touch. Unsur...

Sometimes, little kids have some very odd beliefs about the world around them. Some of it is the adults' fault: we tell them stories about storks delivering babies and boogeymen who visit children in the night. Some of it is the result of very sound logic being applied in very incorrect ways. My favorite example of this comes via NPR's "This American Life," where one little girl came to the conclusion that her best friend's dad was the tooth fairy (seriously, listen to the episode if you get a chance). Either way, the point stands: little kids can believe some very strange things. I was, of course, no exception to this rule. For all that I liked science and understanding how the world around me worked, I had some very notable gaps in my knowledge. A lot of that was around food. I never questioned what was served to me ( for a very good reason ), so I just ended up glossing over what I ate. I knew there were various ingredients that went into the food, but I cou...

It's always interesting to me how people deal with shoes inside of their homes. There doesn't seem to be a universally accepted custom around what to do. Some people ask that you take your shoes off as soon as you get inside. I've even seen some families provide a set of house slippers precisely for this purpose; once you surrender your own shoes, the household provides you with a courtesy pair. Other folks will happily let you walk around with your own shoes on, regardless of what kind of flooring they may have. In my own case, I was taught to take off my shoes when entering a home. I always thought it was a Chinese tradition, but according to at least one link on the Internet, it's far more prevalent than just in Asia . Regardless of where it came from, I always take off my shoes when I enter. Or at the very least, I ask people whether they want me to take off my shoes. If they leave it up to me, I generally take them off. It's more of a custom than anything e...