Sarah continues to work on her painting in the evening hours formerly devoted to cramming science into her brain. One painting incorporates some of her father's photographs of wild flowers in Maine. Another one has photos of one of her lab parters, Asante Ship-Hilts, and a poem from Irving Feldman's book, Teach Me Dear Sister. Here is what they look like right now.

Froggerona and Bunny are Calvin's newly inseparable buddies. He insists on eating with them. They generally get tucked in and don't get too messy at the table, but sometimes Calvin wants to tuck them under his arm as he eats. As you can imagine they would profit from regular washing, but just try finding a stretch of time long enough to get them through a wash and dry cycle that he doesn't cry out for them. Photos for your amusement...

November at our house has been a whirlwind of leaf raking, knitting lessons, quilting and painting. The logs for the bunkbed were harvested up north. It was muddy and Adam's tractor got mired in the mud. But this didn't stop us. A couple of logs ended up getting pushed a few feet into the mud under the tractor, but we got the tractor out.

And we got the rest of the logs to Albany, too... eventually. Really a small Honda Civic hatchback is not the ideal vehicle for carrying eight-foot-long green logs -- but it did make a good excuse for multiple trips back to Putnam Farm.

Albany --

Dave writes:
Right now (2:30pm Saturday November 12) I'm at my office typing this up, with both Calvin and Isabel alternately hanging off of me, drinking hot chocolate, and playing around with various office paraphernalia. Ordinarily we wouldn't be here on the weekend, of course, but we dropped in to the Family Fun program at WMHT radio (next door in the Tech Park) to say hello to Gord the Dragon and Clifford the Big Red Dog.

For canned entertainment, this was moderately amusing -- but then we found a nice patch of Fragmides (ten-foot-tall invasive grass) in the empty building lot nearby, and we stomped out a nice grass-maze for ourselves, and tickled each other with the fluffed-out seed heads from ten feet away. So that was even better!

-- Except that when I tried to harvest some grass stems to try to weave a basket, I found that the broken edges were surprisingly sharp... so I had to stop in here for a Band-Aid. Back to our regularly scheduled program now -- there's a bunk bed to be built, or at least worked on, this weekend...

Albany --

Dave writes: Isabel and I stayed up rather late last night, trying to get a comb through Isabel's hair (which is still suffering somewhat from two- or three-times-a-day swimming this summer) while simultaneously working on solving the first six chess problems out of a book of over 5000 board positions. We got through that first page pretty well. Maybe by the time we get to the ones that I can't figure out how to do, a few hundred pages farther down, Isabel will be able to solve them for me.

In spite of the late night, we all got up together for a bowl of oatmeal with raisins early this morning, and Isabel got to school ten or fifteen minutes early, instead of the usual just-barely-on-time. Here's hoping it's the start of a new trend! We're going to try the school breakfast some of the time now, so that I can get to work earlier (and much more important, come home earlier as a result.)

Calvin and Isabel had a good time at the MapInfo Holloween Party. Calvin especially enjoyed his KitKat bar.