The Puzzle Studio

I thought I built a studio for Carol so she could do art projects. But it turns out it's also useful for other relaxing pursuits.

Carol loves jigsaw puzzles. The other night, she decided the studio was the perfect place for it. She can have peace and quiet except for her favorite music playing, and she can leave a partially completed puzzle there and it does not get molested by children.

Conversations With a 4-year-old - Part 1

Remember Ken Jennings, the guy who won 74 rounds on Jeopardy!? I've been reading his blog for a couple of years now and always enjoy it. He happens to have kids the same age as ours. One of the occasional features on his blog is "Conversations with a 4-year-old". I'm blatantly stealing the concept (and the title!).

Last night Audrey wanted me to read her first bedtime story on a stuffed animal/chair that is in the shape of a giraffe. After the story, she showed me that she could stick her fingers in the giraffe's nostrils. I asked if she was picking the giraffe's nose. She said, "No, he's just a stuffed animal. He's filled with stuffing."

I asked, "What are you filled with?"

She assumed that sheesh-what-a-dumb-question tone and said, "Meat!"

Swing Set Fun

Here's a video of the girls enjoying their new swing set for the first time. The video quality is pretty poor but the audio is good and you can here Audrey and Charlotte's excellent commentary.



If you can't see the embedded video player, you can view the video here.

Back Yard: Phase 3

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We're making great progress on the back yard. Tuesday I decided to take Wednesday off so I could be home to receive the cedar chips for under the swing set/play structure.

If I'm going to use up a vacation day, I better make it worth it. So I put in another marathon 13-hour day and got a huge amount done.

I had started cutting the lumber for the swing set on Sunday morning before heading off to Father's Day activities with my parents and sisters. Monday and Tuesday after work I spent several hours assembling the structure with a little help from my next door neighbor Jeff.

Wednesday the first order of business was to finish the swing set before the cedar chips arrived. The chips were supposed to arrive between noon and 5 and I completed the assembly right at noon.

The delivery arrived at 1:30. 13 yards of cedar chips makes for a very large pile! I could have spent a little more and had it blown in, putting the chips exactly where I wanted them. But there wasn't a blower truck available until the weekend. So it was me and a wheelbarrow. At least the chips are a lot lighter then the dirt I've been shoveling throughout the project.

It took me about 1 1/2 hours to distribute the chip and even them out. I had run out of landscape fabric in the corner of the play area so I couldn't spread the whole pile. But I installed the swings. Carol and the girls were in Richland visiting Carol's parents (and having a wonderful time) since Friday but were expected home about 5:00. I wanted the swings to be ready for the girls when the arrived.

Once I got all that done, at about 3:00, I went to Home Depot and rented a rototiller to till the areas where we'll install sod: about 1300 square feet. My first discovery? Rototilling is damn hard work. After a while, though, I figured out some better adjustments for handle height and "tail" depth and how to stop fighting the machine. But I was still quite exhausted when I completed the task after 5 hours (8:30pm).

Meanwhile, the family arrived home at about 5:30. The girls were very excited about their new play area. They both spent a long time on the swings. Audrey just recently learned how to pump herself on a swing, and she perfected it while in Richland. So she hopped on and took off on her own, immediately swinging as high as her swing will go. Charlotte wants a "baby swing", but she was happy to use the regular swing today and complained whenever either Carol or I wasn't pushing her.

Eventually Carol coaxed Charlotte into the house, but Audrey stayed out on the swing set for more than an hour. She kept trying out all the parts: the swing, the platform (Audrey calls it "the balcony"), the cargo net. As soon as we spread the rest of the pile of chips I can install the slide, which is the part Audrey is most excited about.

So it was a very long day of work, but I made huge progress. Just a couple of hours of leveling and raking and we'll be ready for sod! Once the sod is in I'm taking a few weeks off from landscaping.

P.S. This morning after breakfast the girls decided they wanted to go out and swing. It was about 60 degrees out - not too bad. Audrey got her self all bundled up with hat and scarf and I got Charlotte in a fleece. After a little while of pushing Charlotte I came in the house for breakfast and they had fun by themselves. Audrey even pushed Charlotte for a little while.

Scared Bot version 1.0

For a couple of years I've had the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot kit on my wish list. With gifts received for my recent birthday, I had enough funds to finally buy the thing.

I wanted it for my own tinkering projects. But lately I've also wanted it as an aspect of raising "geeklets". I'm going to do everything I can to expose my two girls to science, technology, math and engineering-related material. I don't want them to grow up with our society's stereotype that girls "aren't good at that."

They will make up their own minds whether those are fields they want to explore further, but my job is to make the opportunity available to them. I got this tinkering proclivity from my own engineer father, who loves to take things apart to see if he can fix them himself and who approaches every project with an "I can figure that out" attitude.

Another reason is that Audrey has repeatedly expressed a fear of robots. We're not sure where it came from. I've explained to her that robots are just machines that can only do what we tell them to do. Now I can demonstrate that to her.

I figured an appropriate first project was to make a robot that was afraid of Audrey! Thus the first project is named Scared Bot. It cruises around happily, until it "sees" something less than 10 inches in front of itself (via its ultrasonic sensor). When that happens, it jumps back in surprise. Here's a little movie.

As you can see, it was a big hit with Audrey.

I plan to post videos of all the robots we make together in the future.

Back Yard: Phase 2

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We're making good progress on the back yard. Last week we finally decided what material we would use for the garden planter and the play area retaining walls. We would have loved to use real stacked stone, but that turned out to be way out of our budget. We considered the modern equivalent of railroad ties, but for about the same cost we decided to go with concrete blocks made to look sort of like stone. I ordered the stone Tuesday and the four pallets were delivered on schedule on Friday. The delivery guy was kind enough to place them right where we wanted them, even though it meant four trips around the block on his forklift.

I started to feel like I was getting a cold Thursday night and had a cough starting on Friday. But I ignored it and got to work Saturday morning. My dad was kind enough to come over and lend me his wall-building experience. I had dug trenches and filled them with crushed rock as a footing, but I wasn't sure how to do the final prep to make sure the wall came out level and straight. Dad was a big help. He and I got the first couple of course of the garden wall laid and Dad was able to take off. I finished that wall about 3:00.

That was just about the time Carol was able to come and help, since Charlotte was down for a nap. I was starting to feel lousy, but she was excited to continue, so we kept working and finished the second wall about 7:00.

It was great to have the walls complete, but a full day of manual labor was apparently not the ideal treatment for my oncoming virus. I showered and collapsed on the sofa.

I didn't get off the sofa, essentially, until Tuesday. I had some kind of flu or very bad cold. The worst chest congestion I can ever remember having with labored breathing and a serious rattle and wheeze. Plus a crushing headache for most of Sunday. It sucked.

But we're getting closer. The next task is to distribute as much of the new dirt pile back into the planter and play area as we can. Then figure out how to get rid of the rest of it. After that we can rototill the area that will be grass and start raking and leveling it. Then we can install sod and the major work will be done. Still hoping to get there in the next few weeks.

Friday Night Pizza - May '08

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Our favorite pizza placed moved a few doors down the block to a larger space. It's now in a space where many restaurants have failed, but Pegasus has a loyal following, so hopefully the jinx won't apply to them. We've been there twice now since the move and we can report that the pizza is still just as delicious.

These Friday evenings are some of Carol and my favorite times. The kids enjoy the food and behave themselves well (actually, they pretty much always behave well). And we all enjoy the walks along the seawall and beach afterward. These are always among the times Carol and I look at each other and express our appreciation of the life we have: wonderful girls, a comfortable home, loving families. Life is good.