Our Blue and Gold Banquet is almost ready for guests. Happy 100th Birthday, Boy Scouts of America.
Three of Daniel’s Webelos Craftsman projects on display: soldered copper man, wood-burned and stained box, wood stool.
Tacos? Burritos? Beans and Rice?
Mark tries to break the pinata.
Daniel’s killer swing breaks the pinata!
Hey, guys, you just won the Pinewood Derby. What are you going to do next?…
I believe we will take you to Disneyland.
And Richard, that was a smoking computer program you wrote for our racetrack timer.
Everybody was talking about it.
…in wood and psychedelic designs. No, Richard, I don’t need help with the camera. I want the photo to look like this.
We just need a coat of poly and the precious wheels with their polished surfaces and flawless axles. This car is poetry.
Speaking of poetry, Daniel wrote a Pinewood Derby Sonnet last spring. I share it with you now to bring you into our circle of anticipation:
The shining pinewood racing cars lined up,
In anxious silence racers waited there,
They were all thinking of the derby cup,
The happy talk and brownies they would share,
The wooden cars zoomed down the gleaming track,
The cars pulled close together then they tied,
The winning cars were hung up on the rack,
Results came in; with Joy the people cried,
With happy hearts the winners shook the hands
Of disappointed boys who lost the race,
With joy the people shouted in the stands,
There was a smile on everybody’s face,
In years to come our sportsmanship will keep;
In days to come, true happiness we’ll reap.
~Daniel Ross
Today I came across the programs from our month’s adventures. Now that I have an electronic copy of these, I can throw them away. Isn’t technology grand?
December and June are my months of excavation. I dump out the drawers and files and baskets and try and make sense of it all. Some days it feels like the mail is the enemy… an endless supply of papers invading my house. I learned long ago that the mail must be dealt with every day or pretty soon we become candidates for some talk show on Hoarding. I still haven’t learned to throw away personal letters or cards. I hoard correspondence in carefully marked boxes in my closet. If you write me a good e-mail, I’ll print that out and save it, too. We’re all allowed a loony habit, aren’t we?
In the spirit of things, I cleaned out the Cub Scout closet at the church tonight. There were newspapers from 1999, a comforter, lumber, countless dried up glue sticks and 20 skeins of yarn.
It feels good to be free from excess… for now, anyway. When June comes I’ll be amazed again at how much paraphernalia we’ve accumulated.
We visited the Tucson Botanical Gardens and Butterfly Garden yesterday. We spent an hour with the butterflies, only to find that our group had given up on us coming out and had gone home. We had a swell time. We watched a butterfly emerge from a chrysalis, a male butterfly show off for a female, and we held a few butterflies. My favorite moment was when Timothy, frustrated with the tour guide who ignored our pleas to let him hold one, grabbed a butterfly himself (in the same manner the guide showed us). It was a brilliant breaking of the rules that I applauded. You shouldn’t have to be a beautiful woman in a business suit to get to hold a butterfly, for heaven’s sake.
Paige did a lovely job and we are so proud of her. We hope you enjoyed the photos.
Did you see the pictures of the hovercraft on Angela’s previous post? Did you think, “That thing will never fly?” Well turn up your speakers and push the play button. Prepare to be amazed.
We held a Webelos flag ceremony in the morning:
And hiked along the Santa Cruz river where the Mormon Battalion came through in December of 1846. The Webelos are carrying big bags of garbage they collected along the trail. It was so hot!
(Mark hiked the whole way, too):
Next, we visited the monument for the Mormon Battalion in Downtown Tucson:
And we listened to Mr. Tossi speak about his experiences in WWII under General Patton. This man landed in Morocco, travelled through Northern Africa and up into Sicily; he went to England and then landed on Omaha Beach during the invasion of Normandy. He fought his way through Europe and Africa in a tank. Daniel asked to have his picture taken with him:
The perennial Halloween shot on the front walk.
Here we reveal the pumpkin artists from our last post.
The boys came home from church and found the backyard required some defensive tactics.
And now that October 31 is over we can get on to much better things.
We pulled out the Christmas music a week before Halloween. That last picture hardly looks like a Currier and Ives Christmas card painting, but the angle of the sun, the early dark nights and the smell of woodburning stoves is in the air in the evenings makes it impossible to ignore that little Thanksgiving and Christmas spirit, even if it’s 80 something degrees outside during the day.