A character in one of my stories knows five ways to kill someone with a paperclip. I don’t—hey, Lawrence Block claims he can’t pick locks—but today I learned how to kill a keyboard with a paperclip.
It’s easy: just knock over your uncapped diet Pepsi while reaching for one.
The board’s only mostly dead, but since the letters are worn off most of the lefthand vowels and the E sticks,* I’m springing for a new one. 
Maybe I should start measuring my life in keyboards instead of teaspoons**—measuring it in spilled diet Pepsi is too depressing.
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News flash: Your children’s disgust for a certain kind of cereal is directly proportional to the amount of that cereal you just brought home from the wholesale place because it was the only thing they wanted to eat for breakfast for the last two weeks.
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The above is from a great post on Kataphatic.
It reminds me that Janie wants roller skates for her birthday. Maybe this weekend, I’ll take her up to a roller skating rink and see how we do. If she still wants a pair, maybe I’ll join her—I used to be pretty good on them. Mom says I could skate before I could walk, but I haven’t been on wheels for at least fifteen years. Wonder if my old in-lines are in the garage?
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Between Halloween and the Twelfth Day of Christmas, if you ask any three-year-old—as long as she’s ours—what vegetable she wants with dinner, the automatic answer will be either “chocolate” or “Reese’s peanut butter cups.” Guaranteed.
When you explain that chocolate isn’t actually a vegetable, her older sister, to whom you have spent the last few bedtimes reading your beloved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,*** despite a persistent cough, will immediately turn on you and declare that chocolate is made from the cacao bean, so it is so a vegetable—and peanuts are, too.
If you counter that cacao beans are seeds and that peanuts are legumes, she will ask why peas and corn and lentils (with requisite gagging noises) are okay for dinner if cacao beans and peanuts aren’t. As you’ve wondered the same thing yourself many times, your only recourse is to tell her that, as pleased as you are that she’s pursuing a career in legislative debate,^ one more word and you’ll pull out the bag of frozen Brussels sprouts you’ve been saving for just such an occasion.
She will flee in shrieking horror, leaving your younger daughter to say, “I wike bussel spouts, Mommy. I want dem,” and to throw a tantrum of Oscar-worthy intensity when you admit you don’t have any.
This is why Because I said so is a perfectly good answer when the Mommy code doesn’t allow you to say, “Because chocolate is for breakfast.”
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Eight hundred more words and some polish and the next section of Fun Project will be on its way a day early, leaving me with an entire day to . . . get cracking on serious project’s next chapter. Which, I think, could use a paperclip or two.
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*Does anyone happen to know what the most frequently used letter is, at least for English-writing typists? That’s right.
**A brownie point for those who can ID the reference, which is one of my favorite poems. Another brownie point for giving me the line you like best.
***With different voices and the Oompa-Loompa songs and everything. I rock the Oompa-Loompa songs—I don’t really have the chops for anything else.
^And that she knows lentils are legumes and corn kernels are seeds. Go, Food Network!
Earful of Cider 