Lovelihood

Having whet my appetite for paper modeling with that LED kit the other day, I carried that momentum forward on another kit languishing on my stack of kits to assemble (and there are quite a few). From the pictures of the completed model on the packaging, I never suspected there would be so much folding and gluing and hunched over a poorly lit surface, and it's proving to be less immediately gratifying that I was hoping for. But, hey, I just spent six months putting together a quilt, so what, exactly, am I complaining about?

Having ditched out of work and hustled home just early enough to take the kids out tonight, I was too busy keeping track of them, one running along eagerly with a friend, the other slowly hauling her basket along beside her, to take pictures. And by the time we got back home to our brewing cauldron of smoke and bubbles, the opportunity for piture-taking had pretty well passed. And so another Halloween passes with no real documentation.

I treated myself (and The Boy), on this day, the one after I finally completed all Halloween costumery, to a simple electronics/papercraft kit. It was an unmitigated success, one that had The Boy scrambling around the house searching for objects that might close the circuit. We've never had so much fun with a simple LED.

You didn't think I was going to fold a bunch of scrap-paper stars and leave it at that, did you? Although, somewhere in the middle of affixing iron-on interfacing and laying on all the folds with the iron and then stitching the folds to achieve a passably crisp line, I wondered if I shouldn't have just settled with maybe just painting some paper ninja stars a nifty color. What I ended up with, though, are pretty kick-ass, ifIdosaysomyself.

Bored in class and with a penchant for decorative paper folding, I made tons of what we called ninja stars when I was a kid. Now I get to make them for my son. And he's deeply appreciative. Wheeee!

For a next-to-closing act on my parents last day here, I drove them (at Oma's request) 50 miles out to visit a house, owned by nobody we know, crazy with dahlias. I'm talking, don't know how the neighbors can stand it crazy. Still, they're quite pretty.

As part of the The Great Boardgame Haul of 2011, the grandparents brought into our possesion a set of pick up sticks, a game whose finer points have escaped me all these years. It has proven to be a hit with The Boy, however, and we've spent some time this week developing an optimal method for dispersing the sticks in an aesthetically pleasing yet challenging array.