We go out to eat at a bistro in nearby Madison Valley. Anya likes the french fries there, but she’s disappointed that the restaurant doesn’t offer her favorite french condiments: yellow mustard and/or malt vinegar. She prepares a small bottle of vinegar at home and brings it with her to the restaurant.
Jan surprises Sabriya by being the “Mystery Reader” for her 2nd grade class. As he did for Liya’s class when she was in 2nd grade, Jan reads Isaac Asimov’s short story, “The Fun They Had”. It proposes a future where kids are exclusively schooled at home on computers. A girl reads about schools long ago, when kids went to a schoolhouse, and thinks about the fun they must have had. As hoped, this story seems to captivate the audience — including Bree’s teacher, who’d never heard it before.
In June, Anya will graduate from both 8th grade and from her K–8 school. That means that we’re spending the fall preoccupied with researching and applying to various high schools for her. She’s doing a good job taking it all in stride.
The application process takes lots of everyone’s time. Today, Jan and Angela attend a parent tour of one school during the afternoon. In the evening, Jan and Anya attend an open house for a different school — while Angela takes Liya to an open house for yet a third school. (Liya won’t apply to high schools until next year, but as with Anya, we thought that she could get an early sense of what the schools were in 7th grade.)
Jan and Anya have a Wednesday evening ritual: Jan drives Anya to her piano lesson at 5:30 pm, and after the lesson, they go out to eat. Anya always wants to eat at the same place: the Samurai Noodle ramen restaurant in the University District. She’s such a consistent regular there that one of the staff, a young woman named Kristina, knows that Anya likes to eat the spicy tofu ramen, plus a huge plate of beni shoga (red ginger).
Time for our annual kiwi harvest! Not a bad year, but thankfully not too many kiwi, either.
The girls’ school holds its annual Engineering Event. Liya and Anya’s grades take turns demonstrating the operation of hand-built vehicles. In a refreshing departure from previous years, this year they get to incorporate little motors into the cars instead of relying on rubber bands.
We’re spending the long Thanksgiving weekend with Jan’s family at the Suncadia resort in Eastern Washington. Jan’s mom, brother Chris and his girlfriend Julie, and sister Skye and her family are here. The girls are excited to spend time with their cousin, Leif, who’s now 21 months old. Here Bree reads Leif one of his favorite books, “Baby Beluga”.
Getting ready to sit down for Thanksgiving dinner
The weather here in Eastern Washington is cold but clear. Jan, Liya, and Lyn take a short walk with Jared, Leif, and Skye along a path that overlooks the Cle Elum River.
More reading time for Leif, this time with Uncle Chris.
We go into the town of Roslyn to check out a new bookstore cafe called Basecamp that’s opening today.
Jan gets an email saying that someone online likes the small house he designed in a 3-D modeling program. Jan hasn’t done anything like that, but thinks Liya might have. It turns out that, back in July, she’d posted a model she’d created of a tiny house. She’d wanted to see if she could pack a house for our family of 5 into a very small footprint.
She had included this description of the project: “This small house has a square footage of 400 ft if you only count the bottom floor, and a square footage of 700 ft if you count the loft as well. This house includes two bathrooms, 2 bedrooms, 1 master bedroom, 1 office, and 1 kitchen. There are 5 wardrobes, so there is plenty of storage space for clothes.”
Liya is happy to see that someone else likes her project. She gives us a tour of the model. She points out that Anya and Bree will have to share a room in the tiny house, but she’s managed to set aside enough room for her to have a room of her own.
Before leaving Suncadia and heading back home, we make one more trip into Roslyn. We’ve signed up to take a quick class at a glass studio to learn how to make simple fused-glass Christmas ornaments. It’s really fun!