Mom has temporarily set aside the tree house to work on other home improvements.
We gave away the playscape a few months back, leaving a big bare patch of dirt in the back yard. Mom decided it would make a nice fire pit, instead of using the dead end street. She made Corwin dig it out a bit last week. Today she made him try it out by building a fire in it. Even with a box of matches and a BBQ igniter (admittedly a poorly functioning one) Corwin didn’t manage to get the fire going. His problem was that he a lot of small twigs, some big logs, and green branches. I eventually got it going by getting a rocket motor I had messed up and setting the fuel on fire which produced a lot of very hot flame, along with positioning the big logs more appropriately. Naturally, while I was trying to feed the flames, I managed to grab a burning branch by the wrong end, so I was clutching a paper towel filled with ice in my hand for the rest of the work1.
Mom also decided to put an air conditioner in my office window, which had been sitting on my desk for a few weeks. We got the window out and Mom cut some plywood to block the rest of it (because it’s a swing window, not a sash window). It turned out to be very effective, even at a low setting.
Mom also got most of the deck re-sealed. It was a good weekend for her.
1 That’s a very effective technique. The burns didn’t hurt much while I had the ice, and afterwards hurt only for 10 minutes or so. No blisters either.