When arriving at the office, the first thing I do is boot my machine.

He took the remaining fillet from the fridge and slid it off the plate, into the bin. He tied the plastic liner and brought it out to the wheelie bin.

He had to learn to climb a ship's rigging; spend many hours aloft, sometimes in bad weather; scrub decks; risk his life chasing whales; eat scrabbly food; sleep in a dank, crowded forecastle.

With two sets of long-distance grandparents, paternal in California and my husband and me in Wisconsin, our young Quebeckian grandchildren sometimes have difficulty keeping us separated in their thinking. It was inevitable that we would become “the Grandma and Grandpa who live with Poquito.”