One of the partners (I work for a law firm) brought his new baby to the office today. Although I have two children of my own, I have a confession to make: I really don't have that much interest in other people's babies. My mother, who taught for over 30 years, thinks babies are fascinating, and my wife, like almost all the women I have known, gets weak at the knees in the presence of anything in diapers (hmm, possible fetish idea to explore). But babies never seem to be doing anything to me, and like most men (well, at least the men I know), if nothing much is happening then I'm not interested. Add to this my almost newsworthy skill at getting the gender of a baby wrong and my inability to say that an infant is attractive when it looks like its been dropped on its face, and I'm just better off avoiding any interaction with parents who go about brandishing their child like the Stanley Cup. So I avoided him. We aren't friends and he surely wasn't looking for me to genuflect over his spawn, but just to be safe I turned left when he and his wife were approaching from the right. It isn't always that easy, but I'll take them when they come.

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I'm a little short in my Britannica target today, so that'll be my bedtime reading tonight. The highlight of today so far has been a long article about abrasives which I will soon be getting back to. The sad part is that I actually find the article quite interesting. The Britannica is extremely well-written, like a clever Harpers or Atlantic article. I don't know what this interest in abrasives says about me, but at this point I am going to assume it's something good.