Hamster wheel

Do you ever feel like life is less like a bicycle and more like a hamster wheel?

11:41pm Saturday night, with as many todos on my list as I had on Monday, I can almost hear the wheel squeaking.

I guess I'm not totally stuck though, since, thanks to autocorrect, I just learned that hamster doesn't have a 'p' in it.

We've got a family video of me as a three year old trying to shove my guinea-pig named Fire into a plastic model of the Millenium Falcon. Maybe my sense of futility is due to that early insensitivity. Did you know the Wikipedia article on the Millenium Falcon is almost twice as long as the entry on the entire field of biogeochemistry?

At night recently, Ingrid has been asking me to tell her stories "about when you were a boy." The other day I told her about all my different pets: Raistlin and Caramon the fire-bellied toads, Chunk and Jimbo the free-range iguanas, Jimmy the box turtle, Flash the gerbil, Kitty the cat, Tol the cat, Flea the cat, Honey the golden retriever, and Perky the mutt. I feel a lot of regret for missed waterings and feedings through the years but I hope that all those little friends on the other side know that I loved them and loved to hold them. Some day I'd like to do a few laps with each of them in the great hamster wheel in the sky just to catch up.