Thirteen on Thursday, By Eric

1. I swear, if Meg wasn't so cute, we'd let a nice Chinese family adopt her. She refuses bottle, pacifier (and thumb), crawling forward (only backward) and any food that she can't place in her mouth herself. She is loud in restaurants and has learned to punch and kick when she is upset, which is far too often. Heeeeellllllppppp Uuuuuuuuussssss!

2. More and more we're seeing nonprofits as our primary customers for Stellar Media. That's pretty cool.

3. We found a place that does $2.99 margaritas on Wednesdays. So you'll find us at Los Amigos at 5:30 p.m. most Wednesdays. Usually we each have a car - so we just split one drink. Yep, we are pretty loco!

4. My brother is having another girl in January. That makes Next Generation Larson Girls: 4, Next Generation Larson Boys: 0. Girls are better people anyway, right? (That's for all my readers out there!)

5. No movement on the big deal that will triple the size of our company. I'll shut my big mouth until something actually get signed on the dotted line.

6. A friend of mine is buying the web company he's been working for for about 10 years. It's a huge company. I think that's amazing. He'll do really well. And he's been giving me great advice as we build our web division.

7. Stella and I did our weekly morning out the other day. We went to the library and checked out some books. Then she read them while we drove up to the Parkway in the rain and found an overlook that wasn't too foggy. She is so much more pleasant when her sister is far away and there's not that competition thing going on. Though I must say she is not nearly as jealous of Meg as she could be. She still thinks being a big sister is great - just "a lot of work" sometimes.

8. Marian is working with our company again, two mornings a week (hooray!). Meg is getting more used to the baby-sitter. She only screams about 25 percent of the time. (The babysitter, that is. Meg screams MOST of the time.)

9. I watched bits of a program on the megarich last night. Not impressed, not envious. I'm more interested in the lifestyles of the "kind-of" rich. Then Marian and I looked around our house and at our family and felt like billionaires. Cue the country music: "I'm already there...'ere...'ERE!"

10. I played Ultimate Frisbee on Sunday and my legs have only now recovered. 1st and 3rd Sundays at 9:30 a.m. at the Waynesville Rec Center. Calling all 7th Day Adventists to come play with us -- you know who you are! (Time will switch to afternoons soon).

11. Met a woman yesterday who tore her ACL doing professional dance. Marian tore hers in college. Hope not to tear mine playing Ultimate.

12. Check out Abigail Washburn. She does bluegrass, but sings some of her songs in Chinese - a language made for the banjo. I heard samplings of her work on The Story. Amazing.

13. After doing a lot of reading, listening, and thinking, I'm persuaded that the death penalty should be abandoned. Not that some people don't deserve it (that's where I'm fairly conservative -- I actually do believe that some people deserve to be put to death). It's just that human fallibility is such that we can't guarantee that innocent people aren't put to death, too, in the process. (We can deduce that we have killed innocents, because several on death row of late have been exonerated only through DNA testing - a method of truth-finding that wasn't available years ago.) Even if it's 1 in a thousand; even if it's one in a million - that is a mistake that betrays the core of our nation's individual rights system. (Read also: "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," a short story by Ursula K. Leguin. Read it here for free, then buy it in "The Wind's Twelve Quarters." It's all about how we shouldn't settle for a society, no matter how seemingly safe and perfect OVERALL, if it literally depends on even just one innocent person suffering. In essence, it's a sharp criticism of hedonistic utilitarianism.) What do you think?