Ethanism

"There should be a charity where animals can donate their antlers to animals who don't have any."

How cold was it today?

I think I saw a couple of penguins huddled together shivering.

More gutter balls than strikes

But if we were good at bowling it would indicate that something more serious was wrong with us.

We rented a car on Saturday, crossed the border into the wilds of suburban New Jersey, and crammed every imaginable activity into the next 14 hours: breakfast at IHOP (Samuel's request), shopping at Target (Jennifer's request), arcade games in East Brunswick, a visit to a real-life mall (Ethan's request, as he was getting car sick), dinner at a Sonic Drive-In (um, that may have been my request), and finally late-night bowling with the DeLorean Mid-Atlantic Club.

Home at 1:30am. Two exhausted boys.

Todd: What did you have for lunch today?

Ethan: Salmonella.

Geriatric Relativity

My antique wall clock always seems to need winding, and I always think, "Didn't I just wind that the other day?"

Then I realize it was probably two weeks ago that I last wound it, but it only seems like a few days because times goes faster as you get older. It's the same law of physics that predicts the presence of 10-year-old candy in grandparents' candy dishes.

Book news

The editor at Little, Brown emailed to say she has "paginated" the manuscript for my second book and is sending it to illustrator Marc Brown to begin his work. The wheels of publishing move slowly, but it's nice to get little emails like this to allow me to pretend that we're all zipping down the publishing highway with the wind in our hair.

Meanwhile, my Google Alerts notified me that Knox County, TN purchased and received 9 copies of "How About a Kiss for Me?" for its library system. I would not have guessed that Knox County, TN even has nine library branches, but...God bless the great state of Tennessee, and I guess this means no more red state jokes for awhile.

"Dad, which came first..."

"Snowballs or gloves?"