Handy Dandy Jack

All My Children is about to celebrate show number 9,000.

That's really something, don't you think?

I'll bet you my grandma has seen them all.

They say that if they made the series into a movie, that movie would be more than one year long.

I bet my grandma would go.

I like to put spaces between lines like this. To me, there's something vaguely stylistic about it. That's probably just me.

Today my kids and I talked about "book smarts" v. "street smarts." Naturally, they all want to insist that street smarts are the key to life, thereby making school entirely unnecessary. I gave them some quotes about wisdom. There was one really cool one from Robert E. Lee: "Wisdom is nothing more than healed pain." There was another one from Socrates that was awesome. You wanna know what their hands down favorite was? Here goes:

"A wise man will pick up a grain of sand and be able to see the world, but an unwise man will just roll around in the seaweed until he is covered in it. Then he will stand up and say, 'Hey, I'm Vine Man.'"
-Jack Handy

Jack Handy wins every time. Socrates smocrates, that's what they say, we want Jack Handy!

Last night it got so cold that my emergency heat came on in the apartment. I don't know exactly how that works, but it happened. I woke up to the smell of smoke. The heating unit gives off this smell when it goes into emergency mode, so I'm told. In any event, there's nothing quite like being roused out of sleep on a Monday morning by the sudden conviction that my house is on fire, only to discover that it is, in fact, not on fire. Good times.

Thanks to Rob, I now have a sense of trepidation every time I am swiping my debit card. What if it doesn't work? Will I have to spit on it?