Sean’s here to visit while his school is closed and the kids are gone home for the winter break. We drove to Mitchell airport in Milwaukee to pick him up, drove him back and sat down to a delicious dinner of fresh pizza from Angelo’s right up the street. Dinner was supposed to be the chili that My Darling B had worked so hard on all morning, chopping up the onions, browning the ground beef and pureeing the tomatoes. She left it all in a crock pot cranked up to high before we hit the road for Milwaukee at eleven-thirty, figuring we could sit down to dinner as early as five o’clock, but at seven the beans were still pretty crunchy, and that’s why we had to order pizza.

Sean brings a tiny little laptop with him wherever he goes. B likes it so much that she wanted to get one for herself so she asked Sean if she could try his out first. As he handed it over he reminded her about its one little idiosyncrasy: It acts as if the function key is always on, so when he types anything he has to hold it down. “I’ve tried everything I could think of to fix it,” he said, “but it’s too much trouble and anyway I’m sort of used to it now.”

B googled “function key stuck” and in thirty seconds she found out how to unlock it. That just about made her day.