We did a new thing this year: we adopted some apple trees from a community apple orchard. We paid a small fee (about 20 apples' worth, if you're buying them at the store), did some pruning, and stepped back to let rain and shine do their thing.
In early Fall, we got the call that our apples were ready.
These are organic apples — not the waxed-up, pesticide-soaked supermodels that you'd find at the grocery store. Your first reaction might be that they weren't any good... but oh, they were, they were.
Deborah asked for a basket for her birthday, spcifically for harvesting things.
The kids enthusiastically picked the low-hanging fruit...
...while Risanna munched.
Pretty soon, the allure of a climbable tree plus the lack of low-hanging fruit led to the logical solution.
I lost count at 360 apples. The Zipper proved very handy, as not only could we move things around, but it could drive on the grass, and provided a handy place to climb on to get upper branches.
The apples needed to be cleaned up, but looked great with a little washing...
Beautiful apples.
They did need to be cut up to get the worm holes out. For all the apples we had, this took days.
After several hours of cooking and a trip trough a food mill, we ended up with more than 20 quarts of really good applesauce.
Hang around us long enough, and you will eventually be here for a birthday. And we Kerrs don't settle for a standard "Happy Birthday" ...we may very well wish you a green frog: Sapo verde to you!
This started when we lived in Costa Rica, where, inexplicably, people preferred to sing "Happy Birthday" in English, or as close to English as they could. (I've encountered this attitude in many places, but a Portuguese friend explained it most succinctly: "When we get to heaven, we will speak in Portuguese. But we will still sing in English." All the good songs are in English. Now you know.) If you're familiar with a Latin American accent, you can start to see how, with some enthusiasm and vague familiarity with the words, happy birthday can start to sound like sapo verde. Green frog to you!
* * *
So Aiden is five now. He spent most of the day jumping around with a five-kilowatt grin on his face, just absolutely delighted to be FIVE. I gave him one present at breakfast (which also seems to be more Kerr family tradition than anything else) and by the time I got home from work, Paul and Martha were also there.
There were presents; there was cake.
There was a fun game of catch in the backyard with Aiden's new foxtail ball.
Wait, where's that ball going?
There was a lot of questionable throwing technique.
There was giggling and laughing until certain birthday persons could no longer stand up.
Much of the rest of the weekend was spent reading the "funny cat book" (Martha gave Aiden a Garfield compendium) to Aiden and Fiona. I'd forgotten how much I'd latched on to that comic when I was about that age. I didn't get half of it, fresh off the plane from Costa Rica (What's this "lasagna" they keep talking about? Wait, it's pronounced how?) but it didn't take long for me to catch on. I'd also forgotten how much physical humor there is in it; the kids think it's hilarious. I guess I've forgotten what it's like to be a kid.
...a kid who understood sapo verde, but not lasagna.
Wonder what our kids will think is perfectly normal?
One of our favorite daily reads around here is Cake Wrecks ("When professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong.") Deborah is so much a fan that, while her mother (being an erstwhile pro cake decorator herself) was here, they made a Cake Wreck of their own.
We think the pink cake was at fault.
I've heard of fender-benders, but fondant-benders?
Actually, it wasn't just Deborah and her mother; most of us, including Paul, got into the act, staying up well past midnight. It was fun. (My contribution? I used my mad color-matching skilzz to turn what threatened to be an orange-and-pink cake into a pink-and-dark-pink cake, and then also matched the fondant to that same color. Oh, and I twirled some fondant strips around pencils.)
The police cake has yet to arrive on the scene. Think the insurance cake will cover us?
* * *
Often lampooned on Cake Wrecks is the subject of spelling. (How many ways ARE there of mis-spelling "Birthday"? You'd be amazed.) Fortunately, they don't take the over-used Grammar Nazi approach, but try to be funny, instead. (I define "Grammar Nazi" as anyone who would rather correct your wording than respond to the substance of what you've said. I've known many.)
But what do you do when you know you're writing for someone whose grammar skills vastly outstrip your own? What if your intended recipient is a renowned editrix and and proofreader for an academic publisher? Well, if you're my friend/co-worker Amy, you get a cake with three deliberate mistakes...
...and a tube of red frosting to make corrections:
Amy found nine!
(You can read the full thing over here. Thanks for sharing the photos, Amy!)
The best part of these "wrecks," though, is this: No matter how it was decorated, you get to eat the evidence. Yum!
You'd have thought it was Christmas, the way the kids were bouncing out of their skins the night before. Fiona wanted to race, and (more importantly!) get her car back after having turned it in on Wednesday. Aiden was just jazzed about the whole thing in general. Cars and racing? What could possibly be better?
Can you imagine what his face is going to look like when he actually gets to build a car of his own and race it?
The setup was impressive: a four-lane aluminum track on loan from a local cub scout troop. From the top of the release gate to the finish line was some 60 feet, and there were another 30 feet after that to let the cars coast to a stop — and a padded back wall for the cars that were still going strong after that! It took up most of the gym.
Optical triggers kept track of times down to one ten-thousandth of a second.
There was a lot of emphasis on fairness, even at the expense of excitement. Once the cars had been seeded on the bracket in a single-pass time trial, sets of three cars were raced, three times, alternating tracks in case one lane was faster than the others. Best average time advanced to the next round.
I got a kick out of the way each car was announced. I hadn't realized each car needed a name; Fiona named ours on the spot at check-in. To my great delight, Mr. Sibert drew out "Zooom!" as he announced ours. Some cars were "built by" and some were "owned by" which may have been a commentary on how much work a parent had put into a car, but I think it was just a slip of the tongue.
Time trials for seeding on the bracket. 4.5771 seconds was our official time.
This was one place were I thought a computer could have helped out immensely — sorting times for 35 cars? A spreadsheet can do that in a snap. Averaging times for three different passes? Instantaneous. Instead, they had someone at a table, scribbling like mad. Rather than make everyone wait, they had a brief intermission.
While they tabulated the time trial results, they had Matchbox races for the younger kids, including a large tub of cars for anyone who hadn't brought their own.
The bracket seeded, everyone reconvened — no small task for 50 adults and equal number of small children. After a short presentation, it was race time.
My friend Jeff Strietzel gave a nice presentation of the Gospel using the "wordless book" made out of race flags.
Fiona's bracket was one of the first to race. She hopped down into her spot to watch.
Racers get to be front-and-center when their car races.
How'd we do, speed-wise? A LOT better than I thought we would, actually. WAY better. Wanna know my secret? I'll tell you. Gather 'round. Shhhhh. I'm going to share with you my number one speed tip for Pine Car Derbies. This is very important:
Don't super-glue the wheels to the car.
Yeah. You wouldn't have thought of that, would you? It makes a huge difference, I can tell you.
OK, in all fairness, I thought I was only gluing the axles to the car, but the glue flowed and dripped down into the wheels when I wasn't watching. I discovered the problem about midnight the evening before we were supposed to turn the cars in, and it took me until 2 a.m. to free the wheels and find suitable replacements for the hubcaps I'd lost in the process. It occurred to me sometime while I was doing speed runs with the car on the belt sander that it was a good thing I hadn't waited until the following afternoon, as I'd originally planned.
Yeah. Third slowest overall. The only two that were slower got encouraging taps from the judge so that they'd actually make it to the finish line.
Our poor Corvette limped over the line, in several cases parking right on it.
But all was not lost; there were still other categories besides overall speed. I smiled encouragingly at Fiona when they called out her name among a dozen others to come to the front.
To my surprise, we didn't place at all for "Best Replica." That had been the category I had been working towards in my mind. Several people later told me that almost none of the fathers agree with the judging in this category — last year, apparently, a perfect model of a Shelby Cobra (it was amazing; I saw it) was passed over in favor of a rough-hewn pickup truck. People were indignant on our behalf, which I found amusing.
The next category up was "Best in Show" which they explained as being for craftsmanship. And, in third place... Fiona Kerr!
Fiona enjoyed the novelty of being on the podium by herself, if only until they called the second-place winner.
Ta-dah!
I was proud of Fiona for her design and painting work, and we all had a very good time. Maybe next year, we'll compete for speed, too!
For some time now, my aunt Martha has been acting suspiciously — going off to spend some time "with a friend," several times per week, studying, and hinting at a surprise activity that was greatly dependent on the weather, but that wouldn't require sunscreen. There were some suspicious posts on Twitter regarding flying. Of course, that's a lot of secret to keep under wraps when you're staying with my parents. Deborah and I were in on it, though, and so I took a break from work, and we took the kids out to Warsaw's tiny regional airport.
Warsaw isn't ready for commercial flights yet. You drive in the gate, and it's assumed that you know where you're going, and that you know which areas are for cars, and which areas are for planes. The fieldhouse looked most accessible, and we eventually found someone who could confirm that this was the place to wait for incoming friends. There isn't even a control tower, let alone boarding gates. There wasn't the cold, clinical separation of modern airports — here, if you got any closer to aviation, you'd lose a finger.
The airport waiting area, VIP lounge.
So we sat out on the picnic benches in the bright, hot sun, and watched the skies. And, sure enough, after about 20 minutes, a small Piper descended from the heavens, touched down, taxied, and parked right by the fieldhouse. The lone door popped open, the flight instructor, my parents ("the surprised") and my aunt hopped out for a mini-family reunion on the lawn.
Once great-aunts and grandparents had been properly climbed on, we got back to flying.
Fiona and Deborah got to go up first, while my parents and I stayed and chatted. Amidst the discussion of the surprise, and other matters, my mother told me a heart-rending tale of my Uncle John, who was, at that time, about the age Aiden is now, and got to go up in a plane... except that he couldn't see out the windows. He never knew that they'd left the ground. It was just a bumpy, noisy ride for him.
So, when I went up with Aiden, one of the first things I made sure was that he could see out, and see the ground. While we were circling the Island, I actually unbuckled him and brought him over to my window to point out things I thought he should see. (To my frustration, Aiden denies seeing much more than than clouds and, if pressed, a few roads. I'm still puzzling over that one. Maybe he didn't understand what he was seeing...?)
MacDonald Island, from the air. Before we left, we stuck a 100-foot arrow over our house so that we could spot it from high up.
After bravely clutching my arm for much of the flight, Aiden said he wanted to go down, so we did.
Possibly the most interesting part for me was actually being able to see through the windshield during the landing, and compare the things I was seeing and feeling — what the runway looked like on approach, the rotation of the plane in a gust of cross-wind, the long pause between entering the ground-effect cushion and when the wheels actually touched down — and compare my gut reactions to what actually happened, and got us on the ground safely. I have a much greater appreciation for the calm, bravery, and training that it takes to stick a landing in a shifting breeze.
I've told Deborah on numerous occasions that I'm planning on getting my pilot's license when I'm 40 — I figure it'll take that long (a) for her to get used to the idea, and (b) for us to be in a financial situation where that's feasible. Now I'm wondering why I put the goal so far off...
