Category: Quarterly Report

The big news in this quarter is the birth of my first child: Kaya Rose.  It’s been about two months since her birth and I am starting to love her dearly already.  As of today, she has developed a single redeeming quality: she smiles.  It sounds like a small offering, but warning, this is not just any smile.  It is the smile of innocence.  She has no personal agenda.  Her smile is big and pure.  Getting one is like being hit with a love laser!

I have also learned a valuable lesson that I am ashamed to admit I didn’t understand already. The amount of love in the world is not finite. Actually, I should say, the amount of love in MY world is not finite.  Let’s assume that I am primarily concerned with the love that is available to me. You might expect that I would be worried that the addition of a family member would mean that the allotment of love that I get from my wife would now be split between me and the new member. Well it is. And that might seem like a loss, and it is worrisome.  But there is another quantity that I didn’t consider. The new family member is also capable of generating love. So now instead of one source of love, I have two!  My love allotment hasn’t diminished, it has been redistributed.  Now I have a love portfolio.  For those of you with economics training, you’ll understand that like many things, love is subject to diminishing marginal returns.  All this is to say two loves are better than one.

So maybe it is that I have actually learned what a family really is.  It’s a love portfolio.  When I think of it that way, it makes me want to have another child.

(Bonus points to the first one who figures out who I am quoting in the title.)

Turtling on the Charles by Dave Britz (You can’t tell from this picture, but this print was created by making a form, then inking it and pressing it into a piece of heavy paper creating an embossed texture.)

 I’ve recently discovered that my memories are disappearing. This isn’t a medical condition. It simply is the case that no matter how awesome an experience is, eventually my memory of it fades and all I am left with is the boring present.

For example, the other day I was throwing out my archives from Business School. Throwing things out is painful for me. So painful that I was considering dumping all the records wholesale without going through them first. At the last minute, my wife convinced me otherwise and I started going through the stuff page by page.

While hunting, I found a work of art that was created for me with great time and effort by a friend from Business School. It’s a picture of a sailboat turtling on the charles.

I realized that the memory of the print, which is very special to me would have been entirely lost without the physical artifact. The memories would be intact, of course, but with no catalyst to activate them, they would never be used again.

I was suddenly saddened by the knowledge that tons and tons and tons of my experiences are essentially lost and trapped with no way to rescue them.

So, I have resolved to create a new artifact. The quarterly report. I will write something quarterly in this journal that will serve as a record of important memories so that they can be preserved.