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From the mouths of babes

My eldest son: "Dad, the mower won’t start."

Me: "I’ll take a look at it."

Cranks on first pull. I report back to my son, "Started on the first try."

My son with holier-than-thou indignity with a touch of anger and a dash of annoyance, "Well I’d sure like to know what you are doing different than me because I pulled that string for 10 minutes and it didn’t start."

Me: "I put gas in it."

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From the mouths of babes

Tommy: "You were typing on my keyboard the other night weren’t you?"

Me: “Yes, I just wanted to try it out. I’m thinking about buying one.”

Tommy: “The guys in my forum got a good laugh out of that.”

Me: “Oh, your monitors were off but your computer was still on wasn’t it?”

Tommy: “Yup. You typed your initials and part of your name. Then ‘This would be a good keyboard for programming.’ and some random characters. I told them ‘Oh, that was just my dad playing on the keyboard.’ They got a good laugh out of it.”

  1. I’ve become THAT dad.
  2. it is time to change that password.
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From the mouths of babes

Tommy: "We need a kitten."
Me: "No we don’t."
Tommy: "I’ll take good care of it."
Me: "When you have your own place to live, you can have a kitten."
Cathy: "If you clean the litter box for our cat every day for one month, you can have a kitten."
Tommy: "Yea!"
Me: "Make it six months."
Cathy: "One month."
Me: "I don’t want another cat!"
12 days later, Tommy: "12 days and I’ve cleaned the litter box every day."

I think I have roughly 18 days to build Tommy a small apartment near Amy’s clubhouse.

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Of Being Dad

File this under things that make me twitch.

Tommy, in a phone call to me: "By the way, my laptop hasn’t worked for the past week and a half or so. Says something about no bootable media."
Me: "Did you install anything recently or drop it?"
Tommy: "No but there are two screws missing on the bottom."

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Of Being Dad

File this under things that make me twitch.

Tommy, in a phone call to me: "By the way, my laptop hasn’t worked for the past week and a half or so. Says something about no bootable media."
Me: "Did you install anything recently or drop it?"
Tommy: "No but there are two screws missing on the bottom."

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From the mouths of babes

Teenager 1, after walking through the mud, cracks joke: "We’re lucky. In Tibet they’d pay thousands of dollars for this treatment."
Me: "You really don’t know what Tibet is, do you?"
Teenager 1: "No. Well, it has something to do with religion."
Teenager 2: "Yes, it’s in Jerusalem."
Me: "Uh, no."
Teenager 1: "I think it borders China."
Teenager 2: "Well it has something to do with the Jews."
Teenager 1: "It’s mostly a tourist attraction right now."
Teenager 2: "Yup. A tourist trap."