AS TOBY, OUR BORDER COLLIE, approaches his seventh birthday, it occurs to me that it might have been a good idea to train him. Lately we've been simply letting him out into the backyard to do his business. After it is clear that he is going to accomplish nothing further, digestive cycle-wise, I whistle for him to come back. But apparently my dog has gone deaf. This is the same dog who can hear the word "cookie" from three rooms over, and even if the word is not used in a dog-related context, he will stare at you until surrender and get him a biscuit. So: "Cookie" he hears fine. "Come back now!", however, doesn't seem to register. He is in the furthest reaches of the yard, sniffing and exploring and pointedly ignoring me. La la la la la, I don't heeeeaaarr yoouuuu. It's freakin' cold out, which is the whole point to why he is out there by himself. My dog gets his time outside, and I don't have to put on my shoes. Everybody's happy. But if he's not going to return, then I have to do something about it. Do I really want to go find my sneakers, put them on, go outside, grab my dog, and drag him into the house? No, I do not. Here's a better idea: Let's call him again! That should work! Toby! Here, boy! Nothing. He continues to sniff. I am standing in my enclosed porch, which while technically "inside," provides no shelter from the freezing cold. And yet, it seems silly to put on a coat so that I can more comfortably stand there, peering through the screen door. So I jump up and down in my socks and T-shirt, feeling useless and impotent. Stupid dog. He seems to understand just how far he can push me, and just as I'm opening the door again to call him, he comes trotting towards me, collar jingling. Hiya! Glad to be back. You weren't calling me or anything, were you? I contemplate leaving him in the kitchen overnight, banishing him from our bedroom and his cozy featherbed on the floor. But what purpose will that serve? He would have no idea why he is being punished, and after an hour he would begin crying mournfully to be freed, and I'd have to climb out of bed to shut him up. So he goes utterly unpunished. Maybe I'll buy one of those fifty-foot leashes, so that when I want him to come back in, I can just reel him in like a sea bass.

LEA, LIKE MOST BABIES, has a wonderful smile. Her face is so tiny that every emotion floods the zone, and her smiles just beam. And we cannot capture this image on film. Try as we might. Alex loves cameras and can always be counted on to perform for them, smiling so big it almost looks fake. Lea, however, is deeply suspicious of cameras, and when one comes into sight, she gazes up at it with a mixture of worry and awe. We do not have a single picture of her smiling, and she is already halfway through her first year on earth. We're going to have to start employing increasingly complicated Wile E. Coyote-like gambits in order to get what we want: 1) Sawing a trap door in the floor and setting the camera down there on a giant spring. When we coax a smile out of her, we press a button, and BANG! The trap door pops open, the camera sproings out, and the smile is captured! Requires very fast film, but I think we can get that at Costco. 2) Hooking a camera on to a metal device which we in turn connect to Lea's shoulders, so that it is pointed at her face at all times. The camera takes pictures every thirty seconds. She has to smile eventually, right? 3) Building a Daddy robot with a giant camera for a head. Put a beard and glasses on it, she'll never know the difference. Robot says "Googlygooglygoogly," she smiles, and the robot imprints it on silver nitrate quick as a wink. Success!

FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF "OH-HOW-IRONIC" COMES THIS: My company is falling apart, and the building that houses my company is also falling apart. Over the past couple of weeks, some spectacular variety of construction has been taking place in the large garage appended to my office. I don't know quite what they are doing over there, but it requires them to use a gigantic jackhammer. This is the Power Tool of the Gods, this jackhammer. And they seem to be applying it directly to the other side of our conference room wall. If you ever want to put your family through a realistic earthquake simulation, I highly recommend the purchase of whatever-the-hell tool they are using over there. The first time they began pounding away, it could very well have been Armageddon -- it was screamingly loud, and the whole world was shaking. My first thought was the boiler was going to explode. But then I thought: What boiler? There's no boiler. Is there? What the hell is happening? It went on for hours, and by the end of the day we were all used to it. If we were a growing company instead of a rapidly contracting one, it would have been fun to bring someone in for an interview that day. Make no mention of the fact that someone had picked up our office and put into one of those hi-intensity paint-can shakers. And if the interviewee ever brought it up, we could feign ignorance: Shaking? Noise? What do you mean? Whatever they're doing over there -- and you'd think I'd have some curiousity about that, but I don't -- it's taken them a long time to complete it. A week will pass, we'll all get used to the blessed relative silence, and then, THOOMMM!!! Thor has returned, and he is angry! The result of all this is, our conference now room resembles a too-metaphorical stage set for a play entitled "The Failing Toy Company." There are huge cracks in the exposed mortar -- in a couple of places you can see right through the wall to the daylight on the other side. There is a small gully in the floor as if someone had picked it up with two hands and just ripped it. All we need now is a dangling wooden beam hanging from the ceiling, or maybe a nice oil spill. (Later...) Wow. Not thirty minutes after I wrote the above words, all the power went out in my office. Everything: dead dead dead. That includes the restaurant next door and the offices above ours. Rumor has it the landlord didn't pay the electric bill. We hung around for about ten minutes, wondered exactly what we were hanging around for, and left. What's next with this place? A stampede of buffalo?

I SEEM TO RECALL that the last time I started a journal, it was a few weeks before I was laid off from a sinking dot-com. As the days and weeks of unemployment stretched out in front of me like a desert road, I found less and less to write about. Or rather, I had plenty of bile to spew, but not the energy to spew it, and the journal died its usual death. We'll see what happens this time: I am about to be unemployed yet again. This is not the way this was supposed to happen. Some people enjoy the journeyman role, bouncing from company to company. I am not like that -- I want stability -- and yet I find myself in a career that scoffs at the very concept. Still, my present company is a known commodity, its products sold in toy stores nationwide. They're not a fly-by-night dot-com. They are supposed to continue to exist, indefinitely. File bankruptcy if you must, but the toys must still be made! And someone if going to have to produce those toys, and that someone will be me. Right? Wrong. It's looking very much like the Chinese leaders have had their fill of the U.S. market. Leapfrog is kicking our collective asses. We have tied our own shoelaces together with the help of some startlingly bad product -- toys that sat and sat on the shelves like Artificial Boiled Meat Product. (I say "we" out of corporate unity, but these horrible decisions were made well before my arrival. Small consolation.) The rumor is, the entire U.S. operation will be shut down, and the whole of the company will recede back to Hong Kong. To me, this is the same thing as going out of business. They've got excellent programmers and artists over there, but they decidedly do not have their fingers on the pulse of the American toy market. Or Europe, either. God knows what they'll produce in 2004, but it will suck. The company is skipping merrily towards complete annihilation. So where does that leave me? In a very bad way. Let's face it. Sheesh. I wanted this blog to be a light-hearted romp of observations and anecdotes. (Like, um, that little Palestine rant of yesterday. Okay, it doesn't always have to be light-hearted...) Well, it may take some determination, but I'd like to try to maintain a healthy attitude here. I do have options, and as bad as things are at the moment, we're still better off than many, many others out there. A sense of perspective is a very valuable thing. (sob) No, no -- no sobbing allowed. I'll get aggressive. I'll find freelance work, and consulting gigs. Stupid as it seems, I'll construct crosswords -- the Times just raised their rates, God bless 'em. If I can construct just three puzzles a week, and if I can consistently sell them, that'll bring in... hmm. Less than 15K. All right, but that's just one possible avenue to explore. The key to success is to have a lot of pots on the stovetop! All bubbling at once! Lots of bubbling pots, and me standing over them, spoon in hand, ready to dip into whichever seems about to... to... Well, this metaphor has run out of steam. China is supposed to be calling in fifteen minutes. Now there's a phone call I'm dying to take. I'm certainly highly motivated to stay awake in order to make my product line the best it can possibly be. I almost wish I didn't like my Chinese counterparts -- screw 'em! Let 'em float! But I do like them, and it's not their fault that the company is imploding, and I'm not about to turn my back on them. Damn my sensitive soul.

"[T]he South African archbishop added that, while al-Qaeda was a terrorist organisation, many of its followers were 'not lunatic fringe, many of them are quite intelligent', and that leaders had to ask why such people 'should be willing to pilot a plane and go to their deaths'." - Archbishop Desmond Tutu, quoted in the British paper "The Guardian," by way of Andrew Sullivan. Oh those daring suicidal hijackers. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. It's quite astonishing how many variations on this theme we have heard over the past 18 months, sometimes from sources I had previously respected. And we've heard it for far longer when referring to Palestinian suicide bombers, killing Israeli civilians in a supermarket or a diner. The amazing argument: Since the Palestinians are an oppressed people, it's okay for them to retaliate in such a manner. It's nothing more than what's expected of them, in fact. Here's my question: If black Americans in the mid-60's had gone the suicide bomber route, would they even have the right to vote today? We'd still have black water fountains -- hell, we'd have them in Maine. When did the whole world forget the power of the non-violent protest? At its most effective, the protest was small and simple -- a simple march, a small boycott -- and the reaction of the people being protested against was a complete outrage: Bring out the fire hoses! A good non-violent protest clarifies a situation like nothing else, makes it clear as day just who are the Oppressors, and who is the Oppressed. When the cause is just, change can be brought around by non-violent protest. It has happened repeatedly. The left-wing sympathizers of the Palestinians know this. Even if they fail to be outraged at the Palestinian murders of Israelis -- and fail they have -- why are they not calling for the end of such murders and the adoption of non-violent techniques? Besides saving countless Jews, might not such protests do a better job of furthering the Palestinian cause? Of course, this bit of fantasizing doesn't take into account that one of the stated goals of the terrorists is to rid the world of Jews. Non-violence won't do that.

YESTERDAY MARKED THE FIRST TIME Alex and I went to a restaurant, just the two of us. We were in the shopping mall to get a new watchband and to get a beard trim. I would trim it at home but the little hairs fly everywhere -- it's like mowing a lawn without using a bag attachment. It takes me twice as long to clean up as it does to do the original trimming. I'd rather pay someone five bucks. The watchband purchase was not an overwhelming success -- the one I picked out is too big for my wrist, so now the watch can be twirled about like a bracelet. I need to stab it with an awl, get a new hole in there. But I don't own an awl. Why would I own an awl? After the beard trim -- and the haircut, since I was in the area -- it was time for lunch. I'd been looking forward to this. Father and toddler-aged son, out for a bite. Child in the booster seat reaching for Dad's french fries. Well, it wasn't to be. He was gung-ho for the cup of cranberry juice, but didn't even consider the notion of eating his grilled cheese sandwich. He was far more interested in the three-ton flowerpot on the windowsill that he was somehow able to slide to within an inch of the edge. Gaaa! No. No. Have a french fry. Please? Alex, have a french fry. He didn't want a french fry. He didn't want food. He didn't want me to have my food, which I was eating in enormous chomps in between efforts to prevent my child from killing himself. His booster seat was a simple lump of red molded plastic -- no straps to hold him in place, no straps to hold the booster seat to the grown-up chair. He would slide around -- in an effort to grab the flower pot -- and nearly topple over. I slid his chair as close to the table as I could without breaking his ribs, then took another enormous bite of my sandwich. He eventually gave up and leaned against me, sucking his thumb. Aww, he's tired. We drove home, and I put him into bed. Three minutes later, he was running around playing with all of his toys. He didn't nap until four more hours had passed. Tricked by a baby. I left half a sandwich behind because he was acting tired. And some very good french fries. Incidentally: The restaurant we went to was in all ways kid-friendly. Kids eat free with the purchase of an adult entree, they gave Alex his juice in a cute plastic cup which we could take home, and the waitress didn't scowl when Alex spilled his juice all over everything. But when they brought out his grilled cheese, it was on a plate that had been heated to the standard 500 degrees. I don't know why they do that for adults. "Be careful, the plate is hot," says the waiter at the fine upscale restaurant, and they are absolutely NOT KIDDING. It is the fashion to not serve plates until you can roast marshmallows on them from ten feet away. Okay, it keeps the food hot. But it also burns the customer. Is that an appropriate trade-off? And even if this is appropriate for adult platters, perhaps they might reconsider the idea when serving food to two-year olds. Hmm? I have recently broken the broad jump record, leaping across the room to prevent him from burning himself on the oven. And here the restaurant is placing directly in front of him a superheated piece of porcelain. Thanks, guys. Why not give him a steak knife while you're at it? Or a... what else is dangerous in a restaurant? Well, whatever -- find it and give him that.