Duck house door!

What can THIS be?


Finally, the Duck house has a classy door! Thanks to Grandpa, Thomas's vision has at last been realized!


The ducks, as is their wont, look on in suspicion...

Recent goings-on

Since the term has started, as you may have noticed, we haven't been blogging as much. Here are a couple of things that I took photos of anyway.


It was very misty the other day...


Some time last week, we lit our first fire of the autumn. I hadn't even cleaned out the ash from the last fire of the spring...


I engaged in a transatlantic bartering with somebody called Shirley. She sent me tea (now that's what I call a good-sized package of tea), I forwarded some special shoe-inserts that you can't get in England. Works for me!

First day at new school (location)

The temperatures are dropping:


The new shoes are bought:


It's time to go back to school!

Egg #2 and the taste test

Zachary left another little gift in the duck house today, so I was determined to give them a try:

The finished breakfast:


Verdict? They taste....like eggs.

Potential Goldmine!

The sun is setting so it's time to clean out the duck house and get them ready for bed and what do I see in their house--an egg! It's the first ever!
I threw it onto the compost pile but Thomas and Simon were horrified--Thomas because he wanted me to fly off to the nearest Duck Specialist Shoppe and invest in a hatchery so that we could raise every egg into a full grown duck (I explained that Zachary will likely lay an egg every day and that only made Thomas MORE insistent that we get the hatchery) and Simon because he wanted to eat the egg immediately. The fact that the egg was covered with piss and shit only seemed to whet his appetite.
The proud parents gave no signs of caring one way or the other when we took the egg. The females of these types of ducks are notoriously bad mothers as they don't make nests and abandon the eggs where they drop. (I've read that they are the inspiration of an absent-minded duck character in the Beatrice Potter tales but, since I have never read any Beatrice Potter, I can't draw any conclusions about whether or not the character does the ducks an injustice or not.)

Born Free, As Free As the Wind Blows...

This day has been a long time coming. Thomas's three turtles (the red-eared sliders, more specifically) have outgrown the aquarium they have been living in for the past two years. Blastoise (formerly known as Squirtle), the largest one, was plucked from the murky waters this afternoon and, after a 30 minute drive, got to feel the sun on her back for the first time in a very long time. Thomas was not happy about this--mainly because he was convinced the feds lurked behind every tree and were going to arrest us for returning stolen turtles (all of these turtles had been stolen from local lakes--NOT by us!--some years ago) to their original habitats. Nothing we said reassured him, he is convinced he is now a hardened criminal.
Blastoise gingerly checks out the grass. At this point she is about 3 feet from a lake edge and Thomas was convinced she'd never make it to the water on her own. She did seem to sit there, as if stupified by the drive, for a very long time.


But, suddenly her fat limbs shot out, she waddled toward the water at a speed I didn't know turtles were capable of, leapt into the water and paddled away. We saw a stream of bubbles as she sunk into the sandy bottom and that was that. Thomas asked again, "Will she be all right?" but after that Herculean display, he didn't actually seem all that worried. It looks like Turtle Paradise to me.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the lake there was a Car Show. While Frederick swam (just try and keep that kid out of a lake!)

two Amphicars "drove" past. Both car and boat (yet, according to reviews, neither car nor boat), they were an amusing spectacle.
We drove behind one as we left. You can see the propellers under the fender. (And there was plenty of seaweed dangling from the axels, too.) It was cute at first but when we found that the car couldn't (or wouldn't) top 15 mph, it got annoying and we were glad to see the last of it.

You should see the other guy

I really should give up playing basketball. Here you see the latest indignity, but I am also forced to confront the bentness of my nose, side-effect of a couple of earlier collisions. Still, I don't EVER get guff from my students...

Thomas is a teenager!!!

If you're reading this, you almost certainly know that the 17th was Thomas's Birthday. His THIRTEENTH birthday! As he seems to have been acting like a teenager for the past year or so it shouldn't come as too much of a shock, but still.


As a surprise, Jami took him out to a local Sushi restaurant that specializes in birthdays (they make a big fuss and will flick food into your mouth if asked - unfortunately the chef on duty only flicked meat, so they passed on that one) and Thomas's friend Sofi was there to meet them (by secret prearrangement). They even take pictures of you as they sing Happy Birthday. Three of the four people in this photo expressed disappointment with it:


No disappointment was expressed with the gifts Thomas received (just the quantity...), and in particular this was the BIG present he begged for this year, games for which Grandparents' money gifts will be spent on:


BEHOLD, the Nintendo 3DS! Actual 3D effects (along with widely reported migraines) without glasses! My, how well Nintendo has done by us over the years...