Sitting at lunch today with Mom, a piece of paper blew by our table.

I picked it up.

Instant art.

It reads:

Antoinette Apostalou, you destroy love in every man's life even Sonny Apostolou's. My love is eternal so you can't win my [heart] dictates that you continue doing what your [sic] doing and that u at your own risk. You should of never hurt those y[ou] love like my father R Ball

Yeah, art.

Technology has a way of democratizing everything. The easiest one to realize this is the printing press, which brought the bible to the masses, moving services away from the Latin-only masses (the other kind of mass) and communication to the Christian God to the common man. But these days, technology continues at such a seriously fast pace that it's democratizing more and more, faster and faster.

These days, anyone can start a company. With the intarweb, it has become easier and easier to reach more and more people, with niche markets becoming a valid, legitimate way to individual, sustainable work. As I've nominally grown up with the web, many of the changes in it, those happening on and around it, haven't much surprised me. Most steps are small, building on previous work, putting a different spin on the same idea. Much of it, though still interesting, fails to feel magical or impressive.

Seriously, some angles will always be unflattering.

An example:

I went into the office this morning with Mom. She leaves the house at 7:00 am, which is really three hours before anyone should be moving, much less heading off to work. Really. When I asked her to wake me at 6:25, she looked at me oddly. "It means I can snooze a bit."

She looked at me harder.

"I'll be up."

"And ready to go by 7?"

"Yes."

And I was, but it was close. And surprising to Mom. I jumped in the shower at 6:47, and really a shower by me that is fewer than 23 minutes in length? Nearly unheard of.

When we arrived at the office, Mom was a little worried for me, how was I going to set up to work, would I be okay, could I work? I didn't have any problem working yesterday, so was surprised she was worried about me this morning. We talked a bit about the project she was working on, and I had an opportunity to introduce the word "metrics" more fully into her vocabulary, replacing "indicators" in her speech patterns.

"We're getting rid of the refrigerator."

"You are? Why?"

"Eric thinks it's too loud."

*blink*

*blink* *blink*

"Oh, the irony."

Yeah, I could not stop laughing before my stomach ached from laughing so hard after that one. If you know Eric, this is very, very funny. Even he laughed, though he could have been laughing at my laughing. And I would have deserved it.

This evening, Eric decided that eating his vegetables would be a good thing.

So, he ate his carrots.

If only all vegetables were so tasty.