Done with the Cowboys

I mean it this time. How many times can you get your hopes up, and then smashed?  I refused to watch the game yesterday.  Sometime close to 3:00, I think, I tuned in just to see what the score was.  Cowboys were down by two, 30 seconds or so left, and they were about to receive the kick-off.  Pffft.  You think I was going to fall for that one?  I turned the TV off, and didn’t even bother until later that night to hear the final score.  Yes.  They lost.  It’s so much more fun to watch a game when you like the team, or at least the quarterback, and have no life-or-death investment in the thing.  That’s what I’m doing right now, watching Peyton Manning going up against San Diego.

I usually take off Monday, but I was starving after work, and brought home Chipotle for Jackson and me.  Those things are delicious but have a horrifying number of calories, and you cannot let them fester.  Banks and I left early enough (6:45) that there was still sufficient light to cut through the woods, and then we stuck to St. Ed’s the whole rest of the time.  It’s pretty consistently well-lit, which Banks appreciates; I usually just cut through there or take a couple of the more obvious roads, but when you devote almost a whole hour to the campus, you realize that there are a lot of areas still unexplored.

Yesterday?  Once again, I am having a hard time recreating that walk.  Incredible!  I know it was around 6:00, because I made a conscious decision to forego “60 Minutes” in the interest of having sufficient time to wash and actually spend some time on my hair.  As I sit here, I cannot say with complete certainty whether Banks came with me the whole time.  Good God.  I guess at this point in the journey, I can’t piggyback two walks into one blog.  All data is erased from the hard drive within 24 hours.

But here was the highlight of the day yesterday:  I worked the nursery again.  What with the OU game and ACL, they were facing an alarming caregiver-to-infant ratio, so they called a few of us from the summer.  Though I pulled myself out of bed and went in at the last minute – and not exactly with the most enthusiastic attitude – the minute I walked in, I melted.  Most of my former charges had graduated to the crawlers, but two little boys were still there, and I swear they remembered me.  There are few things more satisfying than holding a “snuggler.” 

Two random observations:  the name “Harper” is burgeoning in popularity and threatens to become this decade’s “Ashley.”   And do you realize how rare thumb-sucking has become?  I guess that’s because of the proliferation of high-tech pacifiers, but one of the babies yesterday was a thumb-sucker, and we all remarked on the fact that you just never see that anymore.