rampant breeding and sheer luck

Tuesday night, and it was a good one. Packed with things like building a new computer for Sharaun, voting, playing with Keaton in the backyard, and doing dishes. It was a good kinda busy though, the kind of busy where, after you’re done being busy, it’s earlier than you think it should be. Like, you got a buttload done and it’s only 9pm… still plenty of time to do things like blog and work on ripping MP3s and whatnot.

My favorite time of year is underway, the time I refer to as the “holiday trifecta.” I love this time of year, but it’s also a big “hump” for me in terms of day-to-day concentration. I tend to start focusing on things like vacation time, turkey dinners, Christmas trees, and family. Lately, in fact, I’ve been taken by the vision of Keaton dressed in warm, Christmasey clothes – maybe crawling around in front of a twinkling tree. I keep thinking about how we’re leaving in mid-December and not returning until the new year, and how excited I am to get that respite from the daily grind.

And, speaking of Keaton crawling (I swear I was, read back a sentence or two), she’s just about there. In fact, I’d actually qualify her as “there” were she able to crawl continuously – but as it is now she gets up on her hands and knees, takes a few “steps,” and flops back down onto her belly. She’s got the mechanics, I just don’t think she’s put together that she can generate constant forward motion through repetition. My guess is that she’s just days away from completing that neural pathway though, and when she drives that golden spike she’ll be motoring all over the place. We’ve taken minimal precautions in expectation of this eventuality, likely fewer than we should have by now: We have no cabinet locky things, only a few randomly-placed outlet covers, and we’ve covered nothing in foam.

Furthermore, if I were to make a prediction, I doubt we’ll do much of this “babyproofing.” I was telling Sharaun just the other night that I bet cavemen didn’t “babyproof” the cave, or the tree, or whatever they lived in while following game across the lands. Nope, caveman-times babies were exposed to the unprotected terrain. But, I’m confident they learned to avoid the magma, velociraptors, bottomless chasms, and razor-sharp crags just like the rest of us would – by watching other, stupider and less fortunate, caveman-times babies perish at the hands of these various obstacles and deciding they’d rather keep on living instead. Admittedly, I may be giving caveman babies too much credit here. I mean, caveman-adults had much less developed brains that moderntimes-adults, right? How much less cognizant, then, would a caveman-baby be? Perhaps cavemem were only able to advance the species via rampant breeding and sheer luck.

Goodnight.

Also written on this day...

• backroads bob - 2018
• who are you guys? - 2007
• where are the teeth? - 2005
• do you find this odd? - 2004