Vignette one: My daughter asked me if we could snuggle last night. I told her to get dressed for bed, then come find me in my office. A few minutes later she came in, tripped over my sandals, then crawled into my lap in one of our Pong chairs. “Daddy, I like snuggling and talking.” “Me too.”

Vignette two: We’re already doing some minor renovations on the home we recently purchased. To help with brainstorming, I downloaded a demo copy of TurboCAD for Mac and dusted off some of my ancient computer drafting skills, learned during an AutoCAD class my architect father and I took way back when. These are skills I’ve not used since before college, but they’re slowly coming back, and as of now I can make lines, boxes, dimensions, and labels enough to convert my steno-pad sketch into a floor plan of our kitchen and family room. As I emailed Dad: “check me out, drafting! slowly, poorly, but drafting! :–)”.