Science Fare

I just thought of this amusing anecdote.

When I was in high school, a local dude liked to drive his four-wheeler through the big lot behind our house. So Dad scrounged a huge cable from somewhere (maybe it was used for towing barges?) and put it across the trail between several trees. The four-wheeler dude got upset by this and spray-painted this message on an old piece of 4×8 plywood: “YOURA MADMAN”.

View St Croix River June 6 2010 in a larger map

More cute overload from my lil’ sis… With the help of a few stuffed animals!

Give it your browser a minute or two to fetch it from the server. Download.

Take a little swim and make a sand pig? March 1st is official Pig day, you know…

Sand Pig

R.A.S. age 7 1/2.

Filmed on location in Sanibel, March 1st, 2000. Download.

My favorite part is the giggle when she is “pulling” me up the cliff face. Disclaimer: It might take a few minutes for it to finish downloading before it will play back. If you’re using Windows, you might need to install Quicktime.

As lil sis was growing up, when she did something particularly memorable, either in a cute way or in an otherwise memorable fashion, we’d say: “We’re going to tell this story when she’s 16 to embarrass her!” We had fun imagining lording it over her in that distant future…

But now it’s come (and gone!) and I almost haven’t the heart to recount any of those. But maybe a few of the more harmless ones can’t hurt…

I’m tall. The kind of tall that makes people say, “Wow, how tall are you” but not freakishly tall like pro basketball players. All through early childhood, she’d say, “When I grow up, I want to be as tall as Andy”. I’d give her anything if I could, but I can’t give her that.

When she was just a baby, I remember holding her. Being the youngest child growing up, I had never held a baby before. She was more sturdy than I though babies would be. She liked to grab my glasses (getting them full of baby fingerprints), and she’d giggle if you blew a zerbit on her tummy.

C has a sarcastic way of yelling “Crisis!” when someone is making a fuss over nothing. R.A. learned this but didn’t understand sarcasm, so one time when she decided to make a fuss over nothing (she wanted out of her high chair) she not only cried, but also yelled “Crisis!” in all seriousness.

The mess one chocolate cookie can make.

She’d come up to Slate Creek and we’d explore fun places like the old mine…

Sometimes we’d have a sleepover in the loft at the lodge and we’d stay up telling cooperative Goldbug Nelson ghost stories. Mr. Nelson was a previous owner of Slate Creek, and he made his living (such as it was) by mining for gold. Rumor has it that there is still hidden away somewhere a coffee can full of gold…