Obviously, you’ve all been hanging breathlessly for a report on the results from today’s Pine Wood Derby.
It was a cold, windy day. Luckily Corwin and Dad had finished the car the night before so everything was ready to go and we had a leisurely morning before the race. To compensate for that, Corwin lost his neckerchief and we spent a paniced half hour desparately searching the house and cars for it before we gave up.
I took some tools of the trade along, and although I didn’t have the opportunity to fix Corwin’s car and thereby become his idolized role model, I did fix the cars of two of his competitors, which is unlikely to be quite as endearing.
The track awaits
Corwin did reasonably well. He finished first in his den and fourth overall. The cars seemed faster this year. After the event I ran last years car against this year’s and this year’s was a little bit faster. On the other hand, it was so close last year that had a couple of coin flips gone the other way Corwin would have been third instead of first. So, really, he did about the same. Corwin was a bit distraught over his failure to triumph, but he got over it with just a bit of whimpering. Fourth is also good enough to go on to the council level races, although I doubt he’ll do as well there as last year either based on his showing in the pack. Corwin’s hot to do it, though — he handed over his car for safe keeping until then without prompting. That’s serious.
In terms of Corwin’s construction skills, I worked on the car about as much this year as last, but I think it turned out much better (can you tell the difference from the picture? ).
Corwin did a lot better on his parts. Next year I’ll definitely be cutting back on the number of things I do on the car and leave much more of it to Corwin.
P.S. Immediately after the race, Mom rushed Corwin over to his friend Kyle’s birthday party which ran for 2½ hours, which seemed like an insanely long time to be stuck with a bunch of 8 year olds hyped on sugar and presents, but it was at an indoor swimming facility which probably helped work off some of that energy.
P.P.S. As you can see, I took my camera but I didn’t get many good pictures. While the event is fun, it’s not really much for taking pictures. I forgot to bring the little camera to get some video, but frankly that’s not terribly exciting either, so that’s not much of a loss.