Good Fella

My Dad very kindly offered to do our taxes for us this year since he had all our tax paperwork and I strongly suspect he enjoys playing with TurboTax. Because of that we ended up spending more time than usual on the phone together over the weekend confirming details related to tax-like things.

Dad turned 60 last year but looks much younger. He's a humble man; I didn't realize until a few years ago when I was helping him put together a resume for a consulting job that he had been The Man in charge of a whole state's bank regulatory agency before he retired. I think he was so good at his job because he's such a natural judge of character. Dad has a soft southern drawl and the highest compliment he can pay is to say someone is a "good fella." He was the one who showed me how to give John his first bath and trim his tiny newborn fingernails (two things that are much harder than they look!).

Before we left for Denmark last August, I had been encouraging my Dad to check out all the free podcasts he could download on iTunes since he had just acquired my sister Rosalie's old Nano when she upgraded. Dad is reasonably technologically savvy but the podcast concept seemed a little foreign to him.

Then this weekend while were waiting for TurboTax to spin its wheels and give us our magic refund number, Dad commented, "I've been checking out those podcasts you told me about. There is a lot of really interesting stuff out there." He went on to detail the podcasts he discovered on baseball, genealogies, finances and every other topic that he finds interesting.

The next step is getting him to try putting those podcasts on the iPod.