Nefarious did some sans-training wheel biking last year, but not enough to really be comfortable. I figure we’d better get that skill solid before it’s too late, so we did lots of two wheel biking at the park that was quite successful, although she has more than a few minor scrapes and bruises. We ran into friends at the park — a happily common experience — and the play changed to swing shenanigans and sand castles. Later in the evening, we made giant sized bubble blowers and Nefarious and a friend must have spent an hour chasing bubbles up and down the laneway… I forgot just how fun that is.
Tomorrow is the last day of school — or maybe today was, because tomorrow is “sports day”, which I think is more of a BBQ, so of course I’ll be going in to help out… Then three years of hard work pay off with a big graduation concert at week’s end. All-in-all the Montessori Casa (their three year kindergarten program) experience has been excellent and I’m very happy with Nefarious’s academic skills (reading and writing especially) as well as the social benefits. I would recommend it to parents who are in a position to take advantage of it.
All fat jokes aside, if I was this guy I would have been very worried about an embarrassing accident as the collapsing swing temporarily turned my life into a cliché. Thankfully both he, the chain, and the rubber seat of the swing survived. Another creepy single dude that goes to the park to eat, watch kids, and surreptitiously take pictures of those kids with his iPhone.
I spent a lot of today scouring parts suppliers for all the many things I’m going to need, and making a list of all the multitude of tasks on the Sterling. I think Nefarious is going to do her summer visit with her mother soon, which will give me the opportunity to do fabrication work without worrying about poisoning her with the fumes. I feel pretty committed to doing a one-piece wrap-around interior, which is going to mean a few very smelly days as I do the fiberglass work (I’ll build it in foam and wood and then fiberglass over top of that buck.
The visibility inside the car is a little frightening — even though the window is quite large, being as raked back as it is, you actually are only looking out of a very thin slot. To say nothing of the non-existent rear visibility! I think I will certainly be building in a rear-view camera system, and perhaps proximity sensors on the front and rear as well for convenience — especially since I have no plans of building ungainly bumpers.
After a classmate’s birthday party, I took Nefarious and a friend of hers down to the lake where they bravely waded and hopped from rock to rock. Yes, of course she has been thoroughly washed since, seeing as I’m not so sure how much sewage — human or swan — was in there with them.
Yesterday one of Nefarious’s school friends, who knows that I have a split tongue (her dad told her), ran over to me in the playground and was like “open your mouth, open your mouth!”, which is what she does every single time she sees me. Then she asks me about my pants.
“Why do you have all those marks on your pants?”
“Oh, those are from squishing bugs.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, they’re different colours because different bugs leave different colour squish-marks. In fact, these are all butterflies and you can tell by the colour of the mark what colour wings they used to have.”
Then I felt bad, because she burst into tears and sobbed, “you kill butterflies????” at which point I had to immediately tell her it was a joke and that I’d never kill a butterfly, and that it was just paint. Very relieved, she laughed, and went back to bugging me to open my mouth.
