Ten True Photos

Sheesh, it's been a while since I was here.

Ten True Photos. Because words sometimes just seem like too much work.

1. Roll N Write. This is how I spend my Thursday (late) mornings now. Working in Nate's class with the 3rd graders, doing 'beat the clock' math drills that have a bit of a video-game feel, as you have to beat your score to advance to the next level.

2. Basketball. It's what's on tap for Kelly these days.

3. Camera stuff. I've been shooting fairly regularly, and I like the prompts of the dailyshoot.com folks. But maybe I'm shooting too much, and not giving myself time to tell the stories of the pictures. This is Kelly waiting at the local Starbucks for her drink to be made. She sits in the corner by the barristas, and watches the espresso machine work through the glass.

4. Nate and Kelly were off this past week. Skip was not. So he missed out on the trip to the Exploratium on Thursday. This is a great magnet display where you try to 'float' a metal disc down a chute by positioning a larger powerful magnet over top of the chute. He'd probably still be there if I hadn't made him move on to the Next! Fantastic! Thing!

5 & 6. Also on Thursday, our church youth did a Chinese New Year themed "Chill Night". I provided the sparklers from Chinatown (did I ever mention the hijinks that went on when I chaperoned this year's trip to Chinatown? I must talk about the old guy with the joint, and the direct view into the public men's room urinals from the Tai Chi court. Boo yeah.) Anyways, after they played a rousing game of Kill Ball (I don't want to know.) I fed them all, and then took them out into the middle of the parking lot to play with sparklers.

(yes that's Skip)

7. Kelly is making herself an updated version of the Infamous Cow Pants.

8. Tofu.

Tofu is a young Djungarian hamster, aka Winter White (Phodopus sungorus). This is the place he wants to be: going for a ride-along in someone's hand. He climbed into Kelly's hand in the pet store, and looked her square in the eye. Freaky, actually. But how can you say "no" to a hammie who obviously is a people-person.

Here. Have 9 and 10, too.

You would even say she glows.

Tofu is a little boy. I think we will be on the lookout for a little girl with a similar people-person personality (Wasabi, perhaps? Or Miso?), and see if they can't have one little family. Kelly already has 4 friends (plus our Starbucks Barrista) who would adopt a critter as personable as Tofu.