One morning last week I was dropping off the kid at daycare. I walked around to the passenger side of my Volvo and pulled the kid out of the backseat, still in his carrier. He and I looked around.

It was cool and damp and cloudy. I had on a jacket, but I didn't really need one. Catholic high school girls were milling about, bending over to tie their shoes and smoking and generally behaving as if they were in a Cinderella video. I was wearing khakis and a buttondown, because I was on my way to work.

Well, I thought to myself, things certainly have changed.

They certainly have.

Last week I went back to work. Praise Jesus. I'm now an editor at a university. The job requires me to - and this is funny! - look at pictures of diseased and deformed penises (penii?) on a regular basis. What a country, huh? This job is probably someone's secret dirty fetish, and it's just another day at work for me. The coworkers are cool, too. I don't have a parking space, so that's an adventure every morning, but other than that I've settled right in. Personally, I'm glad to have left the web stuff behind. And I might still be working on the department web site every once in a while, but it won't be all I do. And I'm happy about that. I've no interest in becoming some sort of programmer, and that's what web guys are these days.

That said, though, I might go back to school - because the new employer pays for it - and get a computer science degree. Forget that internet stuff - the money's in databases.

And John is in school now. They love him! Every day it's "he's so good!" and "he's so easy to take care of" and "he's so sweet!" For what we pay them they better say he was sweet. He could scream and fling his own excrement all day and I want to be told he's sweet as pie. But no. They really do love him, and he really is a low-maintenance baby.