Odd Requests

Most of the things I do as a stay at home dad are pretty routine. Making food, cleaning up, diapers in the old days, nothing out of the ordinary. I also get requests that are way beyond what I can do, "build me a spaceship daddy, no, a real one", but for the most part I can handle what comes my way. Every now and again I get a request that sounds silly at first, but after a moments contemplation I think to myself, "yea, I can do that".

My daughter bought this ceramic fox on vacation two summers ago. I'm not sure why she thought she wanted it but she did. It was her money that she'd saved so whatever, knock your socks off kid. The fox lives on her dresser and occasionally makes leaps to the floor in some zany attempt to escape. It hasn't gotten away yet, but it has broken off both of it's front legs. My daughter brought it to me and asked if I could fix them. Well, the legs are long gone so my first thought was no, no I can't. But wait, maybe, just maybe, I can. A few minutes with a twig and a pocket knife. A little adjustment. Some hot glue. There you are, tiny wooden prosthetic fox legs. It's things like this that keep my job interesting.

Books I finished this week:
A Thread Across the Ocean - John Steele Gordon
The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg
A Thread Across the Ocean is the story of the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. The cable was laid in 1866, it took five attempts and millions of dollars. I'm not talking millions of today's dollars, millions of dollars in the mid 1800's. It was a big deal, it used a boat that was five times bigger than any other boat afloat at the time. The cable was produced in England because they had a monopoly on the special tree sap that was needed to coat it. The whole story is crazy. It's also instructive to read history like this and realize that presidents and generals were directing troops by telegraph during the civil war. We could send messages 1000's of miles before we knew that it was a good idea to wash hands before surgery. Advancement of knowledge isn't the even flow that we think it is. Great read.
The Dirt of Clean is an entertaining book. You learn about why and how we in the west have gotten to our level of cleanliness. It starts with the relatively clean Greeks, moves on to the rather dirty Europeans of the late Middle Ages and then onto modern cleanliness. It's an entertaining read and I enjoyed it. The only thing I disliked was the authors tendency to hop around in time to justify linear thoughts about progress or lack there of. It reads like what it is, entertainment, more than history. You do get to learn a lot about why Europeans were clean when the Romans lived there but descended into dirtiness for quite a while. Also the unbreakable link between the simultaneous rise of soap and advertising. If it interests you, you'll like it.