The Weekend of the Fourth...

Saturday, the children were invited to the neighbor's house for a birthday party with a young man and his friends, and they had a blast. There was hot dogs and cake, and everyone was supposed to dress up from a character from Redwall. Unfortunately, very few of the kids got into the spirit of the thing and dressed up, but nobody objected to playing with boffers and kiddie bows and arrows and so forth.

Omaha and I spent the day alternately monitoring the kids and weeding the side lawn, which has just gone to heck. It's not frightening, not yet, but it is unattractive so Omaha and I dig into grass with our weeding tools. I also mananged, with a coax extender and a lot of electrician's tape, to frankensplice the car's radio cable back together again, so we have radio. And I finished the last of the dirt pile in the back yard. Now we need the stones.

Omaha made an incredibly delicious chicken salad dinner with home-made stewed chicken. We kept the broth and used some of it to make couscous. The kids went back outside.

Sunday, we drove out to a friend's house for an afternoon of conversation and a picnic dinner, but made it back home in time for the Des Moines fireworks show. It's not the biggest or the baddest, but it's nice in its own right. The big thrill was a bonfire that got loose from the revelers and floated out into the lake. The fire department was called out because some people were convinced a boat near the yacht club had caught fire. The kids waved sparklers around and had a good time. Kouryou-chan seemed remarkably vulnerable to bug bites.

Monday, Omaha said she didn't feel well and went back to bed after a breakfast of pancakes. I watched the kids and cleaned up the kitchen and the dining room, moved around a load of laundry, all the usual stuff. On Omaha's list was the kid's bathroom, so I did that as well, and then as an experiment I tried out the rug cleaner's upholstery attachment on the dining room chairs, which had had a year's worth of children. They came clean and looked great after I dried them in the sun.

We went shopping, hitting Bed, Bath and Beyond, Costco, and Safeway, dropping off Yamaarashi-chan back at her mother's house along the way. Dinner was leftovers.

I felt a little sad that over the week I got in only one or two board games with the girls, but they had a great time all week. It's summer, the neighborhood kids are all over the place, there is light until ten at night, and they've both gotten used to their bicycles, so they have no reason to come inside.

"Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?"

"Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?" is the popular refrain many Linux users like to toss at people who run one of the proprietary operating systems, like Windows or MacOS.

Well, Volvo is betting that, if you're a woman, you would. Their concept car for women has the following blurb: "The no-open hood, which actually can be opened by a mechanic if necessary, is in response to the fact that drivers of new cars today, and conceptually in 10 years, don't need to look under the hood since most of the parts reliably run off electronics."

I have to admit that the ponytail crease in the headrest is an interesting point. "It's not about woman's lib: in an accident, the ponytail holder becomes a single point of contact where all the energy of an impact will be concentrated."