Although I got some good video of Alice I keep missing good Charles clips. Yesterday I spent some time with him outside and he was just full of interesting stories. In this picture you can see him fiddling around with rocks and dirt on the sidewalk. This time he was “feeding his plants”. Charles claimed to have two plants, one of which ate dirt and the other which ate rocks. But only nice rocks, mind you. I think Charles was sorting out the nice ones for his plant when I got this picture. Charles spent quite a bit of time explaining how it was important to provide dirt and rocks to his plants so they would grow.
A bit later I was helping Mom destroy living things that she found inconvenient, mainly vines of some sort on some bushes. Mom got one off and then I worked back along one to spot the root (which looks a lot like a bush stem so it’s not obvious which one to cut). The vine I got turned out to be much larger than Mom’s so I held them up for Charles and announced that, since my vine was bigger, I had won. Charles was mightly impressed. He went on for a good five minutes about it to Mom and I, just to make sure that Mom knew I had won. I’d also won the “stick pulling contest”1 so Charles went discussed how I had won two things that day. But, he was careful to point out, that didn’t mean I was going to win tomorrow. It’s good that Charles keeps me grounded on stuff like, otherwise I might acquire an oversized ego. We wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?
1 The stick pulling contest worked like this: Charles would hold up a long stick made of segments from Corwin’s floating disk soccer game’s net. I would pull on one end until the segments separated and then Charles would announce the winner.