Anything worth doing...

My dad is an engineer. I should capitalize that. My Dad Is An Engineer. (More on that later, I'm sure.) If there's a certain propensity to spend longer than any sane person would on every little detail of a project, perhaps we can blame it on him. Surely there's a genetic component.

"We do it the Hard Way" is the title of a story that my sister Betsey wrote in Junior High (about a muskrat named Vern, who was a detective), but there have been times when I thought it would make a good family motto. (Or, as I once told a friend, "Anything worth doing is worth making very, very complicated.") So I thought it would make a nice title for my blog. Betsey said she didn't mind. I asked her.

I'd like to think that, as I've gotten older and hopefully more mature, I've developed more sensible moderation. But then, right after I got this blog set up the first thing I did was go looking for directions on using a banner (thanks to Lindsay Teague for her how-to), and then I spent all day today (well, as much as one can spend "all day" doing anything when one has a baby) putting this one together. I think I like it. But I'll probably spend more time reworking it in the future.

I read a book called From Anna, by Jean Little, in which Anna has some serious vision problems and is used to not being able to do much, but in her special ed class she gets to make a basket for her parents and discovers that she's good at it. The other children ask why Anna's basket looks so good, and the teacher replies, "Anna has the gift of taking infinite pains." It sounds so much nicer when you put it that way. The gift of taking infinite pains. I like that.