Who I hate today, April 9

Who I hate today, April 9 - This woman hosting a webinar I had to waste an hour on this week. Among other brilliant things to come out of her mouth was, when referring to social norms, she said the word "mores" not like "more-ays" as appropriate, but like "moors." Or maybe it was moops? :-)

Who I love: Foreign toddlers who are so cute when they talk! I mean, it's cute enough sometimes listening to a toddler talk with his high voice and neat cadence, and when he's blurting out a foreign language, especially Dutch, it's too cute! And given that since there is a vast amount of research showing that Americans are the master people and thus English is the master language and QED all babies default to speaking English, it's impressive these kids were able to pick up their "native" language!

Love: Good tourist dads. Passed this guy on the Mall today who said to his brood of youngsters: "Isn't this great? A beautiful day...and a family thing." You see so many unhappy people on vacation, largely because parents set improper expectations about a vacation and then react inappropriately to easily-predictable child behavior. But this guy knew what was going on. But to be cynical, my guess is they had just gotten to the Mall. And in about 200 yards they were going to come face-to-face with a line at the Air and Space Museum half a block long. I should have seen how he responded when the going got tough...was he going to keep it together, like someone I know did when his beloved Teva fell apart while in Nova Scotia? (There was supposed to be a link to a picture here of my foot inside a shredded Teva, but I'm too lazy to post that. So just imagine it.)

Bonus love: This guy outside my building in a car who asked me for help...he was looking for the child support office (good start!) and the address he had for it was right where my building stood. He even showed me the piece of paper showing the address and I was trying to help, but couldn't make sense of what was going on. Then I looked at the date on his letter....it was from 2002! I pointed this out to him and he said, "Yeah....maybe it move?" And I said, "Si senor....maybe it move." That's still not as bad/good as the American tourists who asked me once if the Old Executive Office Building (pictured here) was the White House (pictured ON 45 PERCENT OF ALL MOVIES AND TV SHOWS AND MOST MONEY).