If you happen to spend a lot of time on the phone, by all means, go ahead and use your speakerphone. I understand the discomfort of holding a phone to your head for long periods. I get the appeal of speakerphone; I really do. I use it a lot, myself.

But if you're going to be on speakerphone in your office for more than a minute or so... Get your lazy ass out of your chair and close your damned door.

There's a guy in my office who is on the phone every morning with one project or another at 8am, and he uses speakerphone, because these are all half-hour or more teleconference discussions, and of course because it's speakerphone he has to talk a little louder than usual, and... I just don't need that at 8am. At 2, when the office is busy anyway and quiet just isn't a reasonable request -- sure. But at 8am? Close the door, dude. I shouldn't have to close my door because of your call.

I got home from work yesterday and started doing my usual after-work routine; checking email and an assortment of websites and RSS feeds. One of my feeds is for flickr -- all the new pictures posted by various people that I've marked as contacts or friends.

It's always a nice run. Warren Ellis often posts some really neat art-ish pics, and everyone else has cute family and pet pictures. Even though I've never met some of these people, I feel like I know them, just through their family snapshots. So I'm flipping through them in my RSS browser and this is what my brain looks like:

Oh, cute baby pic... Heehee, look at that silly dog! Ooh, nice addition to the house; wonder how long it'll take to finish building... Another cute baby pic... Who the heck is this kid with the pigtails?

And then I looked at the words accompanying the picture and saw that Matt had posted it. That's right. I failed to recognize my own daughter.

To be fair, she looks really different in pigtails. Less like Matt and more like me, actually. (Which is weird, because it's not like I wear pigtails, either. But that's the effect. At least to me.) Amusingly, this is almost the same reaction K.T. had, when she put pigtails in Jess's hair the first time.

Penny loved her pigtails. She wouldn't let us take them out for her bath, and then whined at me when I insisted on taking them out before bed.

This morning, when I brought her downstairs, I said, "Penny, you want some pigtails?"

"No!"

--Liz