You know, sometimes being a parent is hard!

First of all, let me introduce you to my two new new screens. Screens, reader. Reader, screens.

Now that you're acquainted, let me give you a little background. Aglarond needs mounts for it's aerial calvalry for the seemingly inevitable war with Thay, but they can only breed them so fast. So they've turned to less traditional mounts, wyverns. Of course, they're having a tough time cowing them into being ridable. Maybe you could help? Or perhaps screw it up badly and kill all of the young wyverns? It's really up to you.

Yeah, that's the newest sidequest, a little ranger/druid time to shine, but not steal the show. There's like 4 ways to solve it, each with different outcomes, but they're all pretty similar. I don't know, it filled up a room.

Now, I only have one more room to go before I begin the actual banquet sequence, and the in palace post banquet activities before I submit that as an addition to the ongoing beta test. I figure when that's finished, probably about two weeks, I'll be around the 50% mark, which is pretty significant.

Anyway, back to the title of this post. You can tune out now if you don't care about my personal life.

So I went and picked up my daughter from preschool the other day. This is a pretty multiracial area, so she was sitting there at this table playing with some kind of purple goo; sort of like silly putty I guess, but I don't think they make that stuff anymore. But anyway there's a lot of kids there of different ethnic backgrounds. Matter of fact, my wife is half Mexican, and I'm pretty much a white guy (more on that later) so she's...I don't even know.

But anyways, one of the parents comes in to pick up his daughter, a black guy. So my daughter goes "Daddy, that's a black man!"

Ruh Roh!

So I had no idea what I'm supposed to say. You know how some people are sensitive about that stuff, plus I'm sure the last thing the preschool teachers want is for kids running around pointing out each others race. I ended up going with something like "yeah, that's a black guy." I don't know, what are you supposed to say?

The whole race relations thing is kind of awkward to me, because I'm not particularly sensitive about that. When I was a kid, it wasn't all that serious. We knew better than to use racial slurs, and my parents never did either, but we didn't really tip toe around stuff either. Obese was fat, little people were midgets, african americans were black, and crackers were crackers. Pretty simple stuff, and I keep it that way, that's just my philosophy. But I'm not sure if I should be emparting my philosophy onto her or teach her to be really, really PC, you know? Who knows what tomorrow will bring, hopefully it'll just be people chilling the F out.

Like I said, I don't really get all of the racial relations stuff. There's certain words certain people can't be saying, reparations, who stole what a few hundred years ago from who and how we owe their ancestors, and I'll tell you why. I've personally never owned a slave, stolen somebody's land, or massacred a civilization. I was genuinely curious about this so I made a few calls to family members, but it only reaffirmed what I knew before that time: Most of my ancestors came to the US before the civil war and lived in the North and fought for that side, and my great grandpa Felix was a Mohican Indian (which explains my love of gambling and small pox - hey, they're my people!) so not even my traceable ancestry had anything to do with it, at best they were standers by, at worst victims themselves. I guess I owe myself reparations? And my daughter can be traced back to refugees fleeing Nazi Germany from Poland and to an unidentified guy from Mexico, so...like if you want to bring that stuff up she's been persecuted from almost every angle and is owed land in both New York and Texas that was stolen from her. I mean, when you know all of that, who really has the right to point fingers? It's way too confusing to even matter.

Also, if you're curious as to how I found all of this out, my method was to call my sister who plotted out the family history. If you don't have a sister who did that, I'd suggest getting one, thought it may be too late.

So, obviously, I don't really get the point in bringing all this ancient history up and being all worried about it, because you could probably literally point to anyone and say "your people did something to my people a really long time ago!", but where does that get us? And half of the people doing the pointing probably don't even know the truth about themselves, let alone who they're pointing at.

Which is why I'm pretty sure just saying "yeah, he's a black guy" was the right answer.

Whatever though.