Order Horizon

After Corwin’s camp concert I headed out for the annual rocket club rocket launch. Unfortunately I had not spent any time in the last year on fixing my rockets so my fleet was very thin. I ended up only doing two flights, both on the same rocket (which is the main one I flew last year as well).

Corwin had two or three flights on his rocket from Webelos. I spent most of my time helping out the club mainly by running launch operations and Corwin can prep and launch his rocket without my aid so I am not quite sure how many flights he had. But at least two.

Coincidentally Alice was attending a birthday party at the vocational college next to the park so Mom gathered the crew and dropped the Boyen off with me while she and Alice went off to party¹. After the party Charles left so it was just Corwin and me until closing time. I made Corwin help shut down but he wanted to look at the single vendor who had shown up. In the end Corwin persuaded me to buy him a mid-power rocket kit and some motors. We’ll see if it ever gets put together.

¹ Literally true for once!

Corwin ended his week at music camp this morning with a final morning concert. It was good, especially for a group of kids who have only been practicing for a week. I tried to take pictures but Corwin spotted me and looked the other way as much as possible. I found it easier to take pictures of his seatmates than him. Seatmates who turned out to be mostly girls, which is probably why he may well not have actually spoken to any of them the entire week. Certainly Corwin never confirmed doing so, despite being asked about it multiple times.

We think Corwin enjoyed the experience, although it would definitely be better if we could find some other kids he knew to attend with him.

Alice can jump off the fence on to the swing on her own. Mom even rigged up a bit of twine so that Alice can pull it up to herself once she is on the fence.

Part of Charles’ utility vehicle fleet

Corwin is spending the week at summer music camp. It’s at the local university with lots of out of town students. For them its an away camp but Corwin just commuting in. It’s right near Alice’s day care but Corwin has to be there long before Alice can get ready in the morning. Fortunately we can pick them up at the same time.

We had hoped that Corwin would participate in some of the evening activities but that’s been a losing battle. Now we just hope he speaks to one of the other students while he’s there. Unfortunately no one he is friends with is attending so it’s a bit of a forlorn hope.

The kids have been enjoying a revival of Nerf activity. This made Charles sad because he didn’t have the right darts for one of his guns. Being the kind of Dad who likes to see his children properly armed, I ordered him some more darts plus a medium sized military style ammo box for the darts. Charles really liked the box, although it didn’t end up on the Sleepy Time Crew (it was close, though).

The kids spent a lot of time playing Nerf with their male cousins which was a good way of keeping them busy and occupied. We could also keep them busy by sending them out to collect all the darts that ended up all over the house.

Feel free to visit, but beware of snipers.

We effectively celebrated Father’s Day on Saturday. Mom took the kids out for some shopping while I relaxed at home, recovering from vacation. They returned with a Father’s Day card and a gift. Mom didn’t want to give the card to me herself, as I am not her father, so she gave it to Alice to give to me. Alice promptly put it on the table so she could show me some of the drawing she was doing. However, the gift was nice — a drum set for Guitar Hero: World Tour. I played with it for a while then let Corwin try it out. He failed! Which leaves the drums to me. Bwahahaha!

We were able to try band mode. Mom plays guitar and we put Charles on bass, on the theory that someone who plays the cello is best suited to playing bass / rythm guitar. Charles had some emotional issues when he didn’t do as well as he wanted. However, we found that this version has a “beginners” mode which ignores which fret is active so as long as the player presses something and strums it counts. Charles was able to do that and play along. Later he tried “easy” again and had some struggles with it but is now able to (mostly) not fail. Mom and I think he likes that, as he displays what I think of as his “sternly happy” face, the kind of look he gets while he’s doing something that appears to cause him pain but he insists on doing repeatedly. All we need now is Alice on vocals! She likes to play the drums with the game turned off but she told me that her instrument was going to be the piano.

In other old news…

Charles built a new mothership. He actually disassembled his “old mother ship”: because it was “obsolete”. I think the new one is modeled on the Kuun Lan

Corwin broke his violin. His strings were getting worn or dirty or something and Mom gave him new strings to put on the violin. It turns out, however, that it’s a Bad Idea to replace a violin’s strings by taking all of the old strings off then putting the new strings on. Once all the strings are removed, the bridge falls off and sounds posts inside the violin topple. The bridge we had some hope of putting back but the sound posts — those were a bridge too far. This was of course a few days before a recital leaving no time for it to be sent off for repair. Luckily Mom managed to locate a graduate student in music who had the tools and expertise to make the repair (which is just positioning the posts in the correct location then putting strings on, but if you don’t have the tool to reach inside or any knowledge of where the posts go, it can be a bit of a challenge). This also had the good side effect of not encouraging Corwin to repeat that style of string replacement in order to avoid practice for a week.

We sent Charles’ cello in later for bridge work as apparently the humidity of the summer here caused his bridge to swell enough to make it very difficult for him to push the strings down to the fret board. Corwin was quite envious of Charles’ instrumental lack.

We have started forcing Corwin to go to the health club / gym. Given that I am strongly unmotivated to do so myself, this has been challenging but I think Mom is up to it. Jack is also a member and we have suggested arranging to go together but Corwin just mumbles non-committally.

Alice had her screening for kindergarten a while back, to see if she’s ready. Mom thought it would just take a short time but she ended up staying there for quite a while. The problem, it seems, was that Alice had too large a vocabulary. The test for that required continuing unti a sufficient number of wrong answers out of a set was achieved and Alice just wouldn’t miss enough words. Clearly we will have to tone down our linguistic efforts in our domicile in order to ameloriate consternation for future occurences of this phenomenon.

Mom has decided that because we’re spending the summer without external help and no swim team, the boys need to do something besides electronically entertain themselves. One thing that came up was learning Spanish. From previous efforts, we have a Windows based Spanish learning program, and one for the Nintendo DS. For no apparent reason Charles decided he would try out Spanish on the DS. He seems to like it well enough so far, enough that he undertook to translate the Santa Theme from Invader Zim in to Spanish.

se inclinen, se inclinen, antes de que el poder de Santa.
o se pondrán aplastado, se pondrán aplastado por … las botas de alegre condenado!

Alice has also taken to this because one feature of the DS version is that it will record your voice so you can play it back to check your pronunciation or compare to a recording of a native speaker. Alice doesn’t pay attention to that, she just uses it as a voice recorder to hear herself saying rude things.

We saw “Corwin Tile and Carpet” on the way back.

Alice learned to buckle herself in to the van, which is very nice.

While we were waiting in lines for the Town Lake Bats, Charles spotted a BNL cup on top of a cabinet across the room in the boat on the water behind a partially closed door. It took me a bit to spot it even after he pointed it out. But Charles’ eagle eye immediately picked it out from the clutter. It’s good that he’s learning what’s important in life.

As we close this adventure, I will end with a Five Dolphin Salute to Texas —

We’re trying to adjust back to the daily grind of life at home. Alice had dance class this evening, the first scheduled event since our return (I forgot about Boy Scouts for Corwin — bad Daddy!). Mom got in a bit of trouble for not having Alice’s hair correct, since she missed last week. It must be in a ballet bun and have a silver or grey scrunchie. Apparently it’s like martial art belts.

We spent the entire day driving. Besides Mom dodging some serious weather and potential tornadoes with her mad driving skillz, here’s what the kids remember best from their time in the car.

We spent the morning packing, met Uncle Bruce for lunch, then watched Dawson play some indoor soccer. In Texas this means that you can bounce the ball off the side of the arena which makes for a much faster game, although a bit harder on the goalies.

Oddly, the traffic from Georgetown to Dallas was thick with frequent stops, but once we hit down town Dallas everything cleared up. We were stopped for an hour on the road by a nasty traffic accident — a truck hauling a camper had flipped over, both truck and camper. A medevac helicopter flew in to take people away.

After all that, we still made it to Texarkana before midnight.

Cousins, for no particular reason

Corwin made pancakes for us this morning, and Mom discovered why it can be a bad idea to teach a young chef to cook on an induction stove and then let him loose on a normal stove. When Corwin was done, he simply turned off the pan and left it just like he would at home. Naturally, the remains were baked on to the pan. On the other hand, it’s a great “when I was your age, stoves didn’t instantly cool down when you turned them off”.

After that we had a slow morning and then went off to have lunch with Mimi at Auntie Nong’s restaurant, a Thai one in downtown Georgetown. The best part was crushing Uncle Evil’s fragile ego like the ego of an insect that it is. Mimi decided to pay for lunch and went to get her credit card. At this point Uncle Evil trumped her by having his credit card already out. He, of course, like a standard villian, decided he should take the time to gloat. While he was pointing out the cleverness of his pre-emptive action to Mimi, I gave Nong my credit card behind him. By the time Uncle Evil finished gloating, I was signing the check. The look on his face at that moment is something I will treasure for years¹.

Then we wandered around the Georgetown square which had some kind of farmers / artists market. We had to a picture of a market for Alice’s class. While we were there, we ran in to Kimberly looking just as cute as ever. I tried to get a picture of her with Corwin but Corwin refused to get within 10 feet of her. I susppose telling him I was going to sell him to Kimberly’s father for $12 didn’t help with that. Uncle Evil even tried a compliance grip on him but it wasn’t enough. Kimberly, observing this, said in a voice tinged with excitement and wonder “he’s afraid of me?”.

We high tailed it out of there to visit some a former and once again co-worker, his wife, and their 6 week old baby. Then we went back to Mimi’s house and got some pizza. Uncle Evil and I were sent out for it. While we were there Uncle Evil started a chest thumping contest and I think the local staff thought they might have a bar room brawl on their hands.

After pizza we watched Mimi feed the raccoons and then headed back to Uncle Craig’s to sleep. He and his family had long since crashed out.

¹ Another family member pointed out that perhaps Uncle Evil was playing a deeper game, because on what basis is it reasonable to presume he would pay for lunch in the first place?