London goes FAST!!

Tiny likes looking through all kinds of gadgets. This is the dissecting microscope in Vicki's lab. He's looking at a key for a car we don't even own anymore that we found in our pile of spares. Even though these pictures are only a couple of weeks old, they look ancient now that he's had another haircut.


It was nice this evening so we went outside, and I grilled hamburgers for dinner. Vicki's back is not fixed, not by a long shot, but it's feeling enough better than she can walk without a cane most of the time, and she can hold London more. That's a blessing.

Vicki has lost 24 pounds since January 1. Which is pretty darn good considering she hasn't been able to exercise at all until the past couple of weeks.


We have a long sloping driveway, but the sidewalk is level. If you send down a Hot Wheels car from the top of the driveway it will pick up some speed, but between the bumps and the level (and the fact that most of our Hot Wheels are having alignment problems) they always come to a stop on the sidewalk instead of in the street. We roll nickels down the driveway, too. They're wide and heavy enough to roll really well, and they're big and shiny enough that we can find them again if they veer into the grass. That was actually London's idea, he has some pennies and nickels in his piggybank and he brought some outside and discovered that they could roll.


Here's Tiny with some telescopes. The big black one was my first telescope. I got it last fall with some of my prize money from Spain. The little red one is 13 years old. I found it on Craigslist (community-based classifieds online) and Vicki got it for me for Valentine's Day so I'd have a "baby telescope" to share with London. The skeletal one on the tripod is a compact travel telescope that I built. The struts and rings break down, and it packs up into a space about the size of a big coffee mug (the struts go in the tripod bag). The little table we picked up for free off the sidewalk about a month after we moved in; one of our neighbors was just throwing it out. The legs were a little wobbly, but they just needed to be tightened. Now we use it for all kinds of stuff, but most often as a base for the baby telescope. Saturn is high and bright right now, and often in the evenings I set up a telescope out on the driveway while Tiny plays with his cars. It's a good way to meet the neighbors--everybody loves to look through a telescope, and I've gotten to give a lot of people their first look in the last month.

You can see in the picture that London is wearing a Speed Racer t-shirt. We have been watching the commercials for the Speed Racer movie for about a month, and I told him I would take him when it came out. We went today. It was the first movie he's seen in a theater. We got popcorn and hotdogs and had a great time.

London has discovered that it is possible to make statements that are at odds with reality--to fib, in other words. He doesn't do it very often, and when he does it is always to get out of something he doesn't want to do. So far his most outlandish claim is that, "vegetables make my feet hurt." Sorry, kid. You'll have to do better than that!