Mom forced made let me go out on a walk with her and Polynomial today. We went around the pond which, unlike previous years, has a pair of geese in it. Mom is impressed by how much goose poop just a single pair can generate, which is the main reason we haven’t missed having them in previous years.
Poly liked the geese, though. She tried to go out and play with them but they were quite unfriendly. Poly repeated darted up to the geese and then ran away scared back to us. Eventually Poly noticed the goose poop and snacked, so she got something nice out of the experience.
I had a nice morning — Corwin was away at camp, Mom, Charles, and Alice were at Grandma’s. But all good things must come to an end and everyone got back at various times during the day.
Corwin survived, and only got rained on just as they were packing up to leave. The cooking experience went well enough that no one starved. Corwin had a cold night, even though Mom had purchased a thermal blanket for Corwin. He had played with it while packing and then left it behind. When interrogated about it, he said he “didn’t have room”, even though it weighs about 4 ounces and would easily fit in a back pocket. For us, the most impressive thing was that Mom cooked up some chocolate chip cookies and those lasted until the last meal on Saturday.
Mom returned with Charles and Alice in the evening, burned out from driving. She brought home big wads of loot from Grandma’s house, including a lot of Barbie stuff. I think that demonstrates my favorite aphorism, age and treachery beats youth and skill every time.
[Alice is being prepped for a visit to Grandma]
Mom: You are just so cute.
Dad: Grandma is going to hug you until you pop!
Mom: And then show you off to all her friends.
[Alice starts crying]
Mom: Why are you sad?
Alice: I don’t like the idea of popping!
We sent Corwin off to camp with the Boy Scouts this evening. He was tasked with purchasing food and cooking for the troop as part of his advancement requirements. Mom took him out shopping, which I think was the most traumatic part of the experience.
Corwin was given a budget of $3 / person-meal, which had been expressed to him as a total amount and I, cruel Dad that I am, made his work out the per unit cost. In his head. Bwahahaha!
After that, camping in potential rain and snow while having to cook for 6 other people would seem easy.
[Family dinner time. Charles leads everyone (except Mom and Corwin) in a vigorous hand waving exercise. Dad is so moved he starts singing]
Mom: [jumping in the moment Dad is not vocalizing] There is lettuce and hamburger [points at bowls]. Start eating.
Dad: Yes, start eating or Dad will sing again.
Alice: Yes! I love it when you sing.
Charles: Sing! Sing!
Mom: You’ll end up with a very grumpy Mom.
Charles: So?
Mom: [glares]
Charles: I already had cello practice!
Corwin got a tick yesterday, somehow. It was on his upper left back shoulder. I messed up getting it off and left the head in, so I had to go in after it. Corwin, who normally whimpers in pain during our rough housing before I make actual physical contact bore up very well, not crying or even mewling while I dug in to his skin with very sharp metal instruments.
Later, however, Mom made him cry during violin practice by forcing him to play a section of a song several times.
So, for Corwin —
Truly, music is a cruel master.
Laurie sent Charles a picture of the cetacean room at the London Museum of Natural History because of his abiding interest in that sort of creature. I showed it to Charles, although I had to fight off the other kids so that Charles could see it first.
Dad: This is a picture from the Museum of Natural History in London, England.
Corwin: So we’re going to England?
Dad: Hmmm. [to Mom] We could think about that.
Mom: Except we don’t have the money to do that.
Corwin: What do you mean we don’t have the money?
Dad: Well, we do, but then we couldn’t heat the house this winter.
Corwin: That’s OK, we could wear sweaters. That’s what they do in Foxtrot.
Dad: What if the choice was England or paying for the electricity for your computer?
Corwin: Oh. Well. Hmmm.
Alice went to a birthday party today, her third weekend birthday party in a row (starting here). Plus there was one party at school. Looks like a lot of dad’s got a “School’s Out” special that year.
[Family at dinner]
Alice: Hey Mom — I poop a lot!
[riding home in the van]
Dad: Corwin, leave your sister alone. Alice, toughen up.
Alice: But I don’t want to join the Army!
Corwin has outgrown yet another pair of cleats so Mom took him out to get a new pair. He picked out a very nice near-fluorescent lime green pair. I thought they were a bit … fey, but Corwin liked them. I had to admit he was more in tune with the tween zeitgeist because there was another kid with the same color shoes, and another with black shoes with all the highlighting in the same color. And they did go oh so well with his bright orange socks.
Mom’s modern media machinations continue apace. Last week she bought a new antenna, a big flat disk type one. It worked much better than the previous one. Even laying flat on the roof it received more stations than the first one. But that wasn’t enough Mom. She decided leaving it just laying on the roof wasn’t sufficient — a mast was needed.
Mom looked at several attachment schemes, settling on a mast attached by two straps to the chimney. She carefully measured and then purchased the appropriate straps. Unfortunately, although Mom got her measurements and math right, she messed up a bit on the geometry and forgot the chimney had a rectangular, and not triangluar, cross section. So 3 times the side length turned out to not be long enough.
Mom is not deterred, however — there’s always next weekend!
Soccer has started once again. Corwin’s team is huge this year, almost big enough to field two teams, which makes things nice for scrimmages but not so good for getting in game time for the kids. I don’t know how they’re going to resolve that problem.
Charles’ has a number of the same players as last season, but ony about 9 or so kids, which is about right for his age group. Charles seems reasonably enthused about the experience so that’s good.
Alice, however, is now claiming that she does not want to play soccer, primarily because she doesn’t like to “get sweaty”. This from dirt eating girl.
Corwin had Jack over to visit yesterday but when Mom took him home, it turned out his dad had fallen out of a tree while gashing his wife’s forehead with the ladder on the way down. Both of them went off to the hospital so we kept Jack over night. By afternoon both parents were recovering without permanent injury and we were able to return Jack.
Today was the Pinewood Derby, Charles had a car this year that we actually finished on time because we started back last weekend and the design was somewhat simpler.
I suggested the theme “more dakka” to Charles, which he liked. “Dakka” is the Orc word for the sound an automatic weapon makes while firing. Not being good shots (like troopers in Star Wars) Orcs take the view that the solution isn’t better training but “more dakka”. It’s also a theme that runs through many of Charles’ drawings so I thought he might like doing it with a car.
Charles helped quite a bit with the car, with both the design and some of the attachements. Chares and I both worked on the the base green coat and Charles did the camouflage bits by himself. We cooperated on most of the rest of the car, although Charles did the front turret and a side turret on the far side.
We were limited by weight to how much dakka we could put on the car. It was so close that just the six little bars on the back right put the car at the weight limit. We also had fun shopping for the pieces we used to build the dakka. I wanted to show the boys how you could take random bits of things and put them together in to more interesting constructions. I got a little carried away and had to have the boys tell me “that’s enough Dad, don’t get more stuff!”. It was a good bonding experience assembling the bits in to cool looking dakka.
I was hoping the car would run fast as well, but that was not to be. It was solidly in the middle of the pack, although he did get second in show. I think he should have gotten first but that’s the way it goes. Charles was personally was very thrilled with his win, carrying around the trophy as his friend for the rest of the day.
We played hooky and I took the boys to Engineering Open House today. It was a good time as always. We started the day in the CS building and saw an anti-privacy database, some games, and a groovy computer generated animation. Then we stood in line for a while to get tickets to see Grant from Mythbusters speak that evening.
We spent the rest of the day in Talbot, Everit, and Loomis. Charles’ favorite part was a boat building exhibit. It was teaching how to trade-off resources versus performance. Each kid was giving $1200 which he had to use to buy materials to buy boats. Charles’ boat got on the score board at #6 for speed. The boys also enjoyed the radio controlled airplane group’s display. They had a nice RC simulator. Plus the got to build paper airplanes. Corwin got one to fling all the way across the lecture room.
We ended the day at Loomis Labs doing the perennial favorite, the lab van show. Zip the Monkey got shot and things exploded with liquid nitrogen. What’s not to like?
That evening we went back and heard Grant Imahara’s lecture. He told lots of stories about working with Mythbusters and ILM before that. He even was the actor in the C3PO costume for many of the character appearances during the second set of star wars movies. I enjoyed it, but with all the questions afterwards the boys were getting restless. We were crammed in the middle of a row, so I didn’t want to push out early.
Alice is still at swimming lessons but now Charles is taking them at the same time. Both of them are enthusiastic about going. Frequently Alice tries to start changing in to her swim suit out in the hall instead of waiting till we get to the family changing room. Afterwards I have to help her get her swim suit off and dry her, but she can get dressed by herself. Except, for some reason, for one sock. I have to put that on, then she puts on the other one. Alice’s explanation is that she’s not that good at putting on socks. Apparently she has just enough talent for one.
In other news, it looks like we’ll be hitting the pond more often. The city swimming pool is closed for repairs with no clear plan for getting enough funding, so it’s likely to be closed this summer and may never re-open. The local private club we used to go to is also closing, due to additional state regulations. It’s been kind of limping along and just could not justify the capital expense of upgrading. I expect that there will be some health problem with the pond as well, because that’s just the way things go.
[Charles is playing Endless Ocean]
Dad: He only went 0.09 miles on that dive?
Mom: He wasn’t down very long. He likes to hang with the chick.
Alice: What’s a chick?
Mom: A cute female.
Alice: Charles likes to hang out with a cute girl penguin?
Corwin lost his cell phone quite a while ago. He naturally hadn’t kept it charged up so it could be sitting just out of sight somewhere in the house. Or maybe it was stolen, or just dropped somewhere. Corwin tried to fake concern but he’s just not very good at it. It was much more inconvenient for Mom and me because we couldn’t just leave him places and have him call when it was time to return (such as, for instance, a day long merit badge workshop).
Mom decided that the proper solution was for Corwin to buy Mom a new phone and then could have Mom’s old phone. They took care of that on Saturday after the merit badges. Mom now has a groovy new phone with groovy new features, which someday she may use when she has time to read the manual.
Mom did get the cell phone company to switch numbers so that she and Corwin still have the same phone numbers. My response has been to try and arrange a pool on when Corwin will lose this phone. I thought about involving his friends and fellow Scouts but I figured that was just too much temptation.
Charles has been pestering us about the Wii game Endless Ocean which he saw someone else playing (Josie I think). He didn’t actually play it but he thought it looked cool. He pestered Mom and I so much about it that we both gave in and mail ordered it, so we have two copies on the way to the house. I figured we could just get another Wii console for it, but Mom thinks we should return the extra copy instead. Maybe, though, we should find out if Charles has any friends who
Our big event today was the first of a series of birthday parties for Alice’s crew. It was over at a child’s exercise facility called “The Little Gym”. It is similar to the old Ants in the Pants minus the game arcade and it’s still open for business. The party was 90 minutes and the first 60 went by like summer vacation for the kids. There was much generic running around and jumping, along with some organized activities. After that was 30 minutes of cake distribution and eating. My strongest memory of the event is that the icing on the cake turned some of the kids’ tongues solid green. Not green tinted but literally solid green. I didn’t manage to get a good picture though — the kids would keep their tongues restrained when they noticed my camera.
Alice had a good time — she almost broke in to tears when I told her that it was almost time to go. That’s for the best as she has at least one and possibly two more parties at the same place this month.
Today we shipped Corwin off for a full day of Boy Scout merit badge camp — two four hour sessions. At the end he finished two badges, Eletronics and Engineering. Not that his parents could have helped with those. Although I did help a bit, the night before around 8PM when Corwin said to me, “hey, I need to study up on this, that, and the other thing for my merit badge camp [which starts at 7:30AM, but hey! no rush]”.
I didn’t get any report on much this bit of preparation served to help. Only that Corwin came home with his first electronic circut, with a transister, an LED, and a couple of resisters. He also achieved his life long dream of soldering. He noted that it was actually a bit harder than it looked.
Alice has found a renewed interest in her baby doll because she now has the manual dexterity and patience to change baby doll’s clothes. This used to require whining at a parent but now Alice can zip baby doll in and out of outfits all by herself, even ones with buttons.
Alice has been dressing herself for a while, maybe that inspired her to give it a try with baby doll.
The crisis for Charles this week has been that he ran out of fluoride mouth rinse. He can’t use Corwin’s because it “tastes yucky”. It would be that much of a bother if it didn’t cause Charles to get stuck in the bathroom, anchored by dumb misery to the point where he can no longer function. It requires parental intervention every day to get him over it. I can only hope we manage to procure more of this essential to life substance in the near future.
I do wonder if, in the future, Charles might fall prey to the standard geek trap. We have been working on having Charles bathe himself, but we still have to wash his hair. I fear the day when he has to do that himself and he reads the instructions —
We will definitely have to set a timer1.
1 If you don’t get it you don’t hang out with sufficiently geeky people. Try reading it more literally, with less human understanding.
Over the weekend Mom noticed that we had a good bit of water on the floor in the mechanical room in the basement. I traced it back to coming from the downstairs toilet. After some consideration we decided that it was a bit more than we wanted to deal with so we called in a plumber, who spent most of Monday with us.
It turned out there was a bit of a leak but it was greatly exacerbated by the tendency of the toilet to get stuck on due to the flush handle being broken. Naturally it was a model the manufacturer had discontinued, probably due to excess breakage. As a result we let the fast talking plumber talk us in to getting a brand new toilet with an allegedly lower repair cost and an extra three inches of length in front which I, for one, will appreciate.
The plumber installed everything by Monday evening, although the bill was a bit hefty. There was a bit of sealing he left to cure so I put a paper tape across the top with the word “CLOSED” on it to indicate that use was contraindicated. Naturally the kids asked “what does this mean?” to which I replied “it means ‘closed’, not open for use”. Corwin in particular was depressed over this state of affairs, but he endured. I asked Mom on Tuesday while the kids were gone how we would deal with the fight over first use, but Mom correctly anticipated that Corwin would be the sitter on that and so it proved — the first thing Corwin asked when he got home was whether he could re-open and christen it. It just shows that we sometimes do nice things for him.
This was the big week for Scouting with the boys. Charles had his annual Blue&Gold banquet on Satuday and he graduated up to being a Bear Scout. It was a pot luck and Charles’ den was charged with deserts. Mom bought a 5 lb. cookie and it was gone in the first pass.
Corwin had a Court of Honor Tuesday evening which was loooong. Fortunately Corwin sat with one of the other families so it was better than it would have been. Corwin didn’t advance because he is just one small item away from Second Class (cooking with fire). We’re hoping that he manages to get to First Class by the next Court as he is a good way along with that.
Mom got a couple of pies (pumpkin and cherry) for the Court and ended up with quite a bit to take home. The moral? If you don’t want left-overs, go with the giant cookie.
Poor Corwin. He was stuck at home all day yesterday working on his application and having many personal growth experiences, when Matt and Claire called up to invite the boys over. They wanted to play with Charles but invited Corwin as well because Matt was having a problem with Super Mario Galaxy and Corwin is a well respected local expert on that. Sadly, Matt’s problem went unresolved. We can’t even do some preliminary testing here because the kids managed to our copy of the game so scratched up it doesn’t work anymore. Oh, the missed opportunities of youth!
It being a Sunday with reasonable weather, Mom took up the gauntlet against the sea of technical troubles involved in feeding her voracious visual content appetite. What I think is, Mom doesn’t want to fall behind Corwin’s dual stream consuming so she’s pushing to get dual reception1. Or she just likes the roof. I must admit, there are no children there.
Today’s project was trying to get a TV antenna on the roof in a state such that it can receive local digital TV station signals. Mom was mostly successful, at one point getting 8 different signals. Unfortunately the reception seems very sensitive to exact placement and she had to go up another couple times because just the strain from moving the cable around to hook up to the media center would take out channels. On the other hand, rather than fight the dual input multiplexer / demultiplexer system, she just drilled another hole in the wall near where the current cable comes in and ran the cable from the TV antenna through it to the same outlet on the inside wall (which has space for two connectors).
I think it an tolerable success, with reception of the local PBS station working. I don’t really know, the only thing I use the system for these days is Guitar Hero2.
1 As noted, I just accept the mockery of my more technically adept spawn.
2 I got another Perfect on Medium last week — Even Flow by Pearl Jam.
