Category Archives: Parenthood

Marleigh on Trump

While listening to the radio on the way to school:

Marleigh: Daddy – how much longer is Trump going to be president?

Me: About two and a half year at least

Marleigh:  Two and a half years!?  We’ll all be dead by then, the trees will die first, and they make our air, then we’ll die, then the werewolves will die, and then the regular wolves will come and eat everything else.

Me: Everything will be fine – have a good time in school.

I guess today’s bedtime conversation will be about

  • resilient systems,
  • Adam Smith’s line about “There’s a lot of ruin in a nation”
  • Checks and balances
  • Keeping people occupied with projects (and out of the way)

The existence of werewolves will be a separate day though, don’t want to mix the topics.

Commandment #1 – Be Positive At All Times

My commandments begin!

And by positive I mean no “Venting”, whining, or complaining about things where you have no influence.  force yourself to be upbeat if you have to.   People have a limited brain capacity and naturally occurring bad thoughts crowd out anything else.  After a while you get talented at being negative, which is a road that leads nowhere good.  Go ahead and evict bad thoughts and negativity from your head as much as possible.  By and large a forced positivity is better than a natural negativity, and will crowd out negativity.

This is very difficult to and I do not always follow through on it, but nonetheless, that’s what you must do.

Ten Commandments, 100 Rules, and 1000 Suggestions

As I mostly keep this blog around to bore my daughter in the future, I guess I should start moralizing early.  Towards that end I’m going to start my top ten commandments, one hundred rules, and one thousand suggestion.  It will serve as the definitive source for whatever wisdom I believe in at the time, ordered by importance and severity.