Small Victories

One of my favorite of the OS X's bells and whistles is the dashboard and its widgets. You can find and download a widget (quite often for free, I might add) for practically anything you may want to learn, monitor, reference, or waste time on. I normally try to be responsible with the widgets that I pick up. Most of them are art related. They tell me about paintings that hang in the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam, works from a group of contributing artists at Candor, and the daily color scheme. My dashboard also tells me the word of the day, where I can find the cheapest gas price within my zip code, and what the clouds over my area look like. But the nature of one of my more recent downloads branches quite far from anything else that I use.

This little guy has plagued my dashboard for about two months. The sad thing is that I kept killing him over and over again. I would miss watering him for maybe two days and he would show up on my dashboard with ominous "Xs" for eyes. A wooden sign nailed to his carcass would tell me that my neglect had killed him. I had never owned one of those nano-pets that were so popular in the mid-90s so I blame my inexperience.

However, my resolve to nurture my new widget to the point of chi-pet adulthood grew. Finally, yesterday he donned a lush coat and smiled!

Now that I've won this small vicotory I think that I am going to retire the widget. If anything, it taught me that I can carve out at least a few seconds a day to nurture something. Now I'm going to invest my extra few seconds a day into somehting a little more tangible, a little less pointless.