My son is not that old… he’s coming up on the two year marker (rather quickly, in fact). Young though he is, he’s beginning to show flashes of imagination, and I love it.

His world is small. There are people he knows by name, but not many of them. His concept of work is severely crippled by the fact that his dad works from home (to him, work means sequestering yourself in a different room). His concept of the rest of the world consists of the places he routinely ends up (CVS, Walmart, Walgreens, Church, and the Library). And yet, within his little world, there is great opportunity for invention. He can be one of his great aunts going to work. He can be any one of his grandparents going to Walmart. He can be daddy. He can be mommy. He can be Farmer Dooley. Whatever occurs to him, he makes happen (the gender confusion thing, I’m sure, will sort itself out). The language barrier is still strongly in place — I can’t get too much of a window into what he’s thinking, yet. But I love watching it develop. It’s a great reminder of how fantastic and big and different the world is when you’re not accustomed to it.

Experiencing the familiar through the eyes of someone experiencing the new is inspiring; it’s a gift from my son to me, and often a gift from a writer to their readers.

Not literally, but figuratively. And hard.

You see, one of my biggest problems in life revolves around “I don’t feel like it.” Seth Godin, writer and thinker extraordinaire, talked about just this very thing yesterday, and really nailed it.

What’s it?

Why do you need to feel like something in order to do the work? They call it work because it’s difficult, not because it’s something you need to feel like.

It’s a short post, over at http://bit.ly/aWKJbA . Highly recommended… and I’d encourage you to expand the thought beyond just work too. Whether it’s cleaning up your house, organizing your paperwork, exercising, or any other form of self-discipline, the issue is not what you feel like, it’s what you decide to do.

Or, to quote Yoda, “Do or do not. There is no try.”

I went out to the store the other day (Yay! conquering snow!) and as I drove, the radio played. I’m a little hypersensitive lately about advertising that is a blatant attempt at taking advantage of people… especially people who are trying to bootstrap themselves out of bad situations.

So, a Verizon commercial came on, and started with a discussion of how hard times are, how “you’ve cut your grocery budget — no junk food, no expensive snacks, you’ve cut movie night… but try to cut your kids wireless and you’ll have them protesting in the front yard. Never fear! Verizon Wireless has free phones for the whole family.” It then ran through (you know, Radio Guy with the Fast Voice) the small print.

Here’s how the deal ends up working. You sign up for a $100 plan plus 3 added lines ($10 each) for two years… so, committing to a new $130 payment every month. In exchange for your $3120, you’re getting 4 phones that are a total value of probably $800 (at no contract pricing). But, what happens when you try to cancel? $20 per line per month remaining on the contract. So, when you get to 8 months remaining on the contract and something catastrophic happens, you owe them a payment of $640 if you want to stop making your monthly $130 payment.

Two problems:

First, proposing a new payment of $130 a month to a family that’s “cut their grocery budget and their movie night” seems irresponsible and possibly even stupid.

Second, it seems like interactions with cell phone carriers are entirely slanted their way… there’s little benefit to the customer. It’s not like they drop your monthly charge if you don’t take the free phones and sign the contract. Maybe they should!

Just remember when you’re dealing with them that it IS your money. You can choose to deal with whoever you want. I’m starting to think that it might be time for a revolution in the cell phone market.

We’re entering the sing-song stage around the Mackay household. Everything is subject to becoming a song… Even diaper changes. My favorites are when the boy sings in his American-idol-audition-week best pitchiness and then turns and asks “good song?”

What’s the right answer to that? At this stage, that it resembles a song probably qualifies it as a good song. But, there will come a time where, if the inability to carry a tune continues, the right answer will be, “no, not really such a great song.”
It does amuse me though. Anything and everything can be memorialized in song… Haircuts… Treats… Cars… If he cares about it, he’ll make it into a song. 400 years ago, he would’ve gone into bard training.

I’m off to sing old McDonald.

Sometimes, I think the technophobes among us are on to something. Not in a “whole hog” sort of way, but in a “yeah, maybe there’s a reason behind that” sort of a way.

You see, much like Tootles in Hook lost his marbles, I’ve lost my attention span. Right there… it just happened. I got to the end of a sentence, typed a period, and thought… I should look that up on IMDB. I stopped myself, but that could’ve become a five minute rabbit trail.

I’ve lost my attention span. It seems like not ten minutes of focus go by when I’m trying to write before I’m thinking about looking something up, checking facebook, making sure the world hasn’t fallen apart in the last ten minutes by checking news headlines.

That’s on top of having a podcast, music, or something else playing in the background. I mean, how many things can I truly track at once?

I’ve lost my attention span, but I think I know where to find it. In college, I had a dear professor who spent some of his time with a few of us young guys, endeavoring to help us succeed in life. He preached the value of discipline. It’s a word I avoid because it evokes negativity in my head. But the reality is that I need it. I need to be able to say no to even the good things that are simply distractions.

I’ve lost my attention span. Do I really want to find it?

The weather channel does this great thing on their website when there’s a winter storm warning in effect. It’s a red band across the top of the page. It looks like this:

The thing about it is, I’ve gotten so incredibly accustomed to having that red bar there that I’ve pretty much stopped
paying attention. At this point, I’m not exclaiming, “oh no, a storm!” but “again, a storm?”

So, I’ve decided to recommend a sliding scale, much akin to the terror watch colors. We could start with a string cyan to indicate that there’s winter weather ahead. A magenta could indicate accumulations of up to 7 inches. Pink could indicate a likelihood of ice accumulations. Orange could indicate up to 14 inches. Red would be 14 on up. And we’d add blAck and orange stripes around the edges when there was wind involved.

That way, instead Of the boy crying wolf, he’d be calling dog, cat, lizard, bird, cow, and giraffe. At least we’d know what exactly to expect: exactly what we expect now… nothing at all like what they forecast.

Well… Congratulations to the New Orleans Saints. If you don’t follow sports, there was a big game yesterday… They call it the super bowl. Peyton Manning decided in the fourth quarter to let the team his dad quarterbacked for 10+ years win their first super bowl. There’s just no other way he could’ve lost. It was nice of him.

And you’ll never be able to tell me otherwise. Nothing like blind ignorance of the facts to start a Monday, right?

I’m kind of at a loss here, folks. I mean, hockey talk is reserved for Saturdays… but yesterday, a Friday, we had a hockey post. We certainly can’t take two days in one week to talk about a sport — even if it is my favorite sport. But, I’m so programmed to give you hockey on Saturday, that I’m struggling for alternatives.

I know! How about 5 good reasons to have a hockey stick around the house:

1. A hockey stick is an incredibly useful tool for icicle removal from your eaves. Particularly if your eaves are overflowing with ice. (How’d that happen? I think it probably started with the end of the eaves being frozen in snow, then what little run-off there was just froze on top of it. That’s my theory, anyway.)

2. A hockey stick is great for reaching toys that have managed to find their way all the way underneath the couch or the bed. Can’t reach it with your arm? Don’t grab for the broom… get a hockey stick! Brooms are for guys who play curling.

3. A hockey stick gives you the aura of a hockey player. Particularly in areas of the world where they don’t play a lot of hockey… like, say, West Virginia. My neighbors probably think I was a superstar in another life!

4. A hockey stick is useful for getting rid of crab apples in your yard. Particularly if your neighbor isn’t home. Enough said.

5. Last, but certainly not least, it’s a good idea to keep a hockey stick around the house in case… a hockey game breaks out. It hasn’t happened to me yet, but… any day now, someone will knock at my door and say “Wanna play some hockey?” After all, Kevin Costner’s baseball players walked out of a corn field. C’mon. If that can happen, random people could show up at my door wanting to play hockey. I eagerly await the day.

I’m writing this the morning of January 1, 2010 — I usually write ahead of time around here, but I thought for this one, I’d just do it the morning of.

Happy new year! It’s 2010. Wow. In the year 2000, I guess I would’ve been 16. As I recall, we spent the end of 1999 at the school my parents were missionaries at. Worried. “What’s going to happen with Y2k?” was the thought on everyone’s mind. I won’t recall for you that, at that young age, I had figured out that pretty much nothing was going to happen. I think this was because, at the time, I was a mac user, and Macs didn’t have the Y2k bug. My data was incomplete, but my conclusion was correct.

I digress: it’s now ten years later. This is really the first decade that I can remember all of in detail. College… Marriage… Jobs… Immigrating… a first child. It’s been a busy ten years. It’s been a great ten years.

In our household, there’s a little bit of a practice we’ve been doing since our first new years as a married couple. On New Years eve, we try to write a little bit about the year that has passed — big events, little events, happy events, sad events. It’s just a little “where we are as a family” that helps us to remember what the Lord has been doing with us. It’s fun to look back over those things, to get a reminder of happy things and a challenge from themes that arise again and again.

This year, we had a little extra help concocting it: Michael Hyatt published a blog post that included 7 questions to help review the year that has gone by. I’ll reprint the basic list, but he has more detail to help over at his blog.

If the last year were a movie of your life, what would the genre be?

What were the two or three major themes that kept recurring?

What did you accomplish this past year that you are the most proud of?

What do you feel you should have been acknowledged for but weren’t?

What disappointments or regrets did you experience this past year?

What was missing from last year as you look back?

What were the major life-lessons you learned this past year?

Helpful questions, and questions that will be fun to come back to. May your new year be blessed, may your love for the Father grow deeper, and may he be gracious to you.

It’s very possible that, at 26 years old, you will find yourself lying on the floor, playing the same games you played when you were six. And it will be awesome.