Mild Amusement

Every now and then, I get into a mood where I want to listen to a particular style of music. I don't think there's any discernible pattern as to when I want to do this. I just seem to randomly decide to listen to a particular genre or artist. If I'm really feeling like that genre, I will listen to the same song on repeat for hours . It's not really that I love that one song as it is that I feel like listening to that particular sound or set of lyrics. For this particular blog post, I'll point to an episode where I was listening to 1990's R&B. Again, I don't quite know how this started, but I did start listening to a few songs from that era. There were a few fun trips down memory lane in the course of that mix, since my adolescence was from that general time period. Let's just say that I knew more of the lyrics from memory than I expected. Still, I didn't know all of them. When it came to Des'ree's "You Gotta Be," I couldn...

I mentioned it recently, but I have a bit of an opinion about valid units of measure. Specifically, I am a fan of the metric system when it comes to temperature . As I mentioned in that post, a system that tells me that the temperature is "negative four degrees" is much better at explaining that it is flippin' cold than one that tells me the temperature is "twenty four degrees." The negative sign matters. Now, as soon as I mentally conceded that the metric system made a ton of sense for temperature, I immediately started thinking that it probably makes sense for other units, as well. I mean, if I'm going to apply the whole "this just makes sense" standard to the ambient temperature, it makes sense to think about mass, volume, and length in the same general way. Why force people to remember that there are sixteen ounces in a pound? Or that, more confusingly, there are eight  fluid  ounces in a cup? The conversion rates just seem arbitrary at that ...

My sister was in town recently, so that means we got to spend a little time with her and her family. It was good seeing them, as always, though the fact that she has young children means that seeing "them" includes having interactions with little kids. This, as you can imagine, means all sorts of amusing anecdotes. In this particular case, it was less something that a kid said and more what was said about a kid. You see, the Mild Nephew has a decent memory. He will remember specific things about people, the sort of things that amuse him. I guess on some level we all do this ("oh yeah, I like so-and-so. They're nice"), but it's not nearly as refined in a little kid. Apparently, he will flat out say to his mom that he wants to go visit so-and-so because they have dogs and he wants to see the dogs. The same sentiment applies to other people, and other attributes. What's more, he has an impressive-for-his-age mental rolodex of people and attributes. When...

I almost didn't notice, but I have been blogging for a decade. Yes, ten whole years. In fact, I was bad enough at tracking the dates that I am now a month late in celebrating the ten-year anniversary of my first post  (the first one was apparently in August 2009). I never imagined that my random musings would lead to a full-blown writing practice, as the Mild Wife calls it. Still, here we are, all these years later. I figured the most fitting way to mark this occasion would be to revisit some of the more memorable/fun blogs posts during that time. As you can probably imagine, a lot has happened in ten years. So, I present you some of the highlights from the last decade: I got married a couple of years ago . There were several blog posts about it, but the term "Mild Wife" started making an appearance in posts shortly thereafter. The resulting Mild Honeymoon also led to plenty of laughs. I decided at about the two-year mark to  stick to a schedule of one blog post ...

The Mild Wife and I both like to cook, but I don't immerse myself quite as much in the endeavor as she does. I will occasionally suggest an interesting combination of ingredients (grilled onions in a salad is delicious), but she just has a passion for it that I can't match. Why do I say this? Because she doesn't just enjoy cooking, she enjoys learning new recipes, looking at social media posts about food, and the like. To paraphrase the Batman villain Bane , I merely adopted cooking. Now, to be clear, this does not mean that the Mild Wife does all the cooking. I put in my share of effort, to the point where we joke that I am the sous chef . Like I said, I enjoy the activity, and I do like to play with the ingredients to try to come up with something delicious. However, I find new recipes far less often than the Mild Wife. Most of the time, the Mild Wife will find something, and we will try to make it at some point. One of the most memorable instances of this, however, i...