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.