What is cool?

I must be getting old and conventional, because what passes for entertainment in my life seems to be getting more mundane as the years roll on. Even more surprising is how little this disturbs me.

For example, we spent a quiet evening at home last (Saturday) night. After we tucked the kids in, my wife read a book on the couch while I propped myself nearby and wrote on my computer. At around 9 p.m., I tuned into NASA-TV to watch coverage of the Soyuz TMA-6/International Space Station docking.

For the next couple of hours, I watched the celestial show in the corner of my screen while I worked away on another piece of not-quite-award-winning prose. The lights were dim, and the peaceful, blissful quiet of the house was broken only by the static-laden chatter from Moscow, Houston, and points far above.

A couple of weeks ago, the kids danced around the kitchen when they came home to find our new dishwasher, installed and (silently) churning away underneath the kitchen counter. Our old unit had unceremoniously given up the ghost a couple of weeks earlier after years of increasingly cantankerous performance. If it wasn't waking the neighbors, it was returning load after load of still-dirty dishes. Those days are, thankfully, gone.

So this is what our life comes down to: a Saturday night devoid of anything remotely resembling coolness, and a family celebration around the arrival of a new appliance.

We wouldn't have it any other way.