Safety is White

This morning, Mark saw Arthur crawl into the bathroom and pull himself up on the side of the bathtub.

So Mark went to Jerry's and now I am looking at a Safety 1st Cover Clamp Toilet Lock. It's sitting in its packaging on my desk. The picture shows a white man's hand locking down a white toilet set on a white toilet with a white plastic lock. We own a piece of plastic that will show up every speck of dirt and we're supposed to lock it on our toilet. Couldn't they have at least made the lock black?

The warning on the box says, "Never leave a child unattended in the bathroom. This product is only a deterrent. It is not a substitute for proper adult supervision. Discontinue use when child becomes old enough to defeat it." This warning sounds like something that should come with internet connections. Luckily, the toilet lock *doesn't* come with an internet connection.

Supposedly our new toilet lock is easy for adults to use. I'll bet the same people who designed childproof caps for medicine are the same people who designed the Toilet Lock. When I was a child, I used to open my folk's childproof medicine containers for them. Arthur sleeps through the night, and I don't want to have to wake him up at 4 in the morning just so I can pee. Maybe that internet connection wouldn't be such a bad thing after all. As long as it doesn't come with a web cam.

If I were designing a lock, I'd simply embed electromagnets into the bowl and lid. That way you could switch the lock on or off and nothing white would have to be cleaned. Hmmm. Electricity in the toilet bowl; probably a bad idea. Oh well. ("Oh, they make those," says Mark. "But they're more expensive.")

Mark also got a bunch of locks for the kitchen cabinets. And the 'fridge. We're supposed to leave one cabinet unlocked as the "fun cabinet." I guess we'll put all our plastic storage bins there so Arthur can have a tupperware party. All of our cabinets connect, so I'm not sure how we're supposed to have only one be the fun cabinet. Also, I'm pretty sure the cabinets contain secret passages to the insides of the kitchen walls. I know Jerry's makes stud finders, but I don't think there's such a thing as a baby finder. Maybe we can get a web cam for the insides of the walls.

On a completely different subject, when we went for a walk on the Willamette River this morning, we're pretty sure that we saw a juvenile bald eagle. It sat in a tree for a very long time. Mark thought it looked a little mechanical, and hypothesized that it was actually a spying device so the government could keep an eye on the antiwar protest happening in Eugene.

That's it; we can get a mechanical bald eagle to train a web cam on Arthur's every move. There must be a metaphor in there, somewhere.