When was the last time someone told you they were proud of you?

It was in the aftermath of the last time Griffin blocked. I noticed very early that he was having difficulty urinating and so I whisked him off to the emergency vet hospital. I let everyone know what had happened on Twitter and Facebook and then after discovering that my boy would need surgery I had to be strong for him and help him recover. It was in the recovery that my friends and family told me how proud I made them in how good a kitty-daddy I am. It made me feel wonderful, and thankful that my boy survived and is now dozing in post-play-post-treats-under-the-heating-duct kitty happiness.

“You need to make a major change in your life. Do you make it all at once, cold turkey style, or incrementally? “

This is exactly how I stopped biting my fingernails. It was a bad habit and I knew it would take forever and be nearly impossible to overcome. Or so at least that was the narrative that I told myself. Then one day a few years ago I decided that I had had enough of hiding my fingers because I was embarrassed by them. I did a little reading and there were lots of suggestions on how to break myself of the habit. Mostly they were related to things I had to buy, like little fingertip condoms, special fingernail polish which would harden the nails beyond damage from teeth, all the way out to click-training yourself out of the habit. I got to laughing and really thinking about how if I could just make a break with it I could do it. And that was all it was. I brought some willpower to bear and resolved to not do it any longer. A line in the sand as it were. Since then I haven’t gone back to biting my fingernails. I’m quite proud of my accomplishment. So I would say that at least for me, it was the coldest turkey of them all.

Have you ever had a mentor? What was the greatest lesson you learned from him or her?

I’ve never really had the benefit of having a mentor. Nothing directly that way anyhow. The closest I’ve ever gotten was during college when I felt a glimmer of it in some after-class discussions with professors that I was taking classes with. It never really amounted to much because that sort of thing felt awkward, dwelling too long and feeling that you’re a pest is just too much to bear so you cut it off quick and don’t repeat it.

At work there is some talk from time to time about mentorship but it strikes me quite along the same lines as leadership. You can’t help but walk five feet before you collide with a leadership this or a leadership that. So much attention paid to leadership and I laugh that there is no attention paid to followership. Why train leaders and ignore the followers? Seems unfair to me.

But still, I don’t see mentorship to be all that relevant. Perhaps it’s a definition issue. I see mentorship to be a little sidelong curious, two people who are relating a little too closely, a relationship that is suspiciously intimate and exclusive. Perhaps I suspect people of being more filthy than they might be, but I can’t help but think that there might be something more to the mentoring experience than just intensely training someone intimately. I guess I can’t separate the lecher from the roman senator enough to see mentorship for anything more than it being at best, suspicious and at worse, scandalous.

“Write down the first words that comes to mind when we say . . .

. . . home.

. . . soil.

. . . rain.

Use those words in the title of your post.”

This is easy. The word is gardening. We cleared out a plot of land between the end of the walkway next to our garage and the beginning of the established garden to create a vegetable garden. We’re in our third year of working on this little plot of land and we’ve made some improvements. One of the most notable is the chickenwire fence we put up to keep the wildlife from raiding our garden. Last year all our plants were safe, but we had too many and so none of them worked well. This coming year we’ll likely do half of what we did last time and maybe we’ll be more successful. Of course, all this is predicated on the notion that the climate will work with us. It used to be that you could be sure that there wouldn’t be any frosts by Memorial Day but these days with the wild variability in the weather I don’t know if that old standby will be as reliable as it once was. Last year a surprise freak frost/freeze devastated Michigan farmers. I can only hope this year we don’t have a reprise of that again.