This month my car’s odometer clicked over to 200,000 miles!  I’m only responsible for seven thousand of those, though.  And most of that total came during road trips.  These days my day-to-day driving accounts for, I dunno, maybe three thousand miles a year?  The average for Ameri­can men in my age bracket is around nineteen thousand.  According to a 2021 U.S. Department of Energy analysis, for my vehicle age (twelve years, 1¼ of which it has been in my possession), my mileage checks in around the twentieth percentile.  Hooray for working from home!

When I was a kid, using a credit card meant writing the date and the amount of the charges on a slip of carbon paper, placing the card into the imprinter with the carbon paper on top of it, running the imprinter over the embossed numbers, and signing the slip.  But by the time I was old enough to have a credit card of my own, paying with it was much easi­er: just swipe it through the reader!  Then came 2017.  The magnetic strip was no longer considered sufficiently secure.  Using a credit card became significantly slower: now you had to insert the card into a machine and wait several mo­ments for it to be recognized, which was initially accompa­nied by an angry BRAP BRAP BRAP sound like you’d done something wrong before the readers started playing happier approval tunes. 

Anyway, technology marches on, and now we have tap cards.  The process could hardly be simpler.  When all items have been scanned, you simply hold your card against the reader, wait for it to be recognized, wait long enough to con­clude that the approval beep is not forthcoming, try again, fail again, give up, insert the card into the machine, wait several moments for it to be recognized, hear the little tune, and then retrieve your card and leave with your purchases.  What could be easier?

I was watching an episode of Masterchef Australia with Ellie, and one of the contestants who was floundering a bit started trying to hype herself up.  “You’re all right, love! Come on, sweetie! There you go, love.”

“I’ve never heard anyone talk to herself this kindly before,” Ellie remarked.

“She found the greatest love of all inside of her,” I said.

Ellie asks what I meant, and I explained that I was making a reference to a Whitney Houston song.  Ellie was negative nine years old when this song hit #1, but it was such a big deal in the ’80s that I assumed it was one of those songs that everyone knows, like “Every Breath You Take”.  Ap­parently not.  She asked me how it went, which put me on the spot: I knew “I found the greatest love of all inside of me”, of course, since that was the line I had referred to, and I knew the first line, “I believe the children are our future”.  And then it turned out that I also remembered the second line, “Teach them well and let them lead the way”.  But then I didn’t⁠—well, wait, I also remembered the third line: “Show them all the beauty they possess inside”.  After that, though, I was⁠—no, hang on, the fourth line was “Give them a sense of pride to make it easier”… and the lines kept coming and ultimately it turned out that I knew the whole thing.  So, yeah, I’m not a fan of Whitney Houston, but apparently, un­beknownst to me, for nearly forty years now I have had a chunk of my brain devoted to remembering the full lyrics to a song I probably haven’t heard since I was in my mid-teens.

Speaking of music, I have been working on revising my list of my top 100 songs, since it’s been over two years since the last update.  I was frantically trying to get everything done by May 25th, because that would mean that the date tag on it would read “2025.0525”, and my OCD insisted that being able to apply that tag was of vital importance.  But then I discovered that Julie Christmas had put out a new album last summer, and that Sparks had done so just this month, and there was no way I could get acquainted with these records in time.  So now the struggle is going to be to con­vince my brain that it is acceptable to post an update prior to 2026.0626.

I also thought about waiting another month to upload this article, because it doesn’t feel like four items make for a full minutiae post.  Of course, Ellie brings home enough pre­school anecdotes that if I just passed them along, I’d never have to miss a month⁠—but they aren’t really my stories to tell.  But this one charmed me enough that I couldn’t resist, especially since it means this article will consist of five items.  So, one little girl at Ellie’s school has a phobia about insects, and she recently returned from a vacation.  The ensuing conversation: