Every Dog Has His Day

Good night, America, how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

-Steve Goodman
The City of New Orleans (1970)

Well folks, it's official: Hell has frozen over. Solid.

The perennial underdogs of the NFL, the New Orleans Saints, have won the Super Bowl. It's a good thing they rebuilt the city stronger after Hurricane Katrina, because this will be the longest and wildest Mardi Gras ever!

We are trav'ling in the footsteps
Of those who've gone before,
And we'll all be reunited,
On a new and sunlit shore,

Oh, when the Saints go marching in,
Oh, when the Saints go marching in,
Lord, how I want to be in that number,
When the Saints go marching in!

-When The Saints Go Marching In
Traditional Southern Gospel Song

(Little-known fact about me: I'm a big fan of Dixieland Jazz!)

Language Barriers

As a parent, you sometimes have to decide which is better: to step in and fix a problem for your children or give them the tools they need to fix it themselves and step back out of the way.

My daughter was messing around with the settings on her phone last night and managed to change the default language. After punching a bunch of buttons to no avail, other than having the phone splutter out a long string of Español, she brought the phone to me with the expectations that I'd fix it for her.

I handed her an English-Español dictionary and left her to fix it herself. As an extra bit of motivation, I told her that if she didn't fix it, all of her text messages would be sent out in Spanish and no one would be able to read them. (Yeah, I know. I'm bad.)

Eventually, after a long struggle with the nuances of conjugating Spanish verbs, she figured it out, and her phone is now speaking the Queen's English right and proper.