Bree makes a little crossbow from wooden skewers and tongue depressors. It’s powerful enough to fire a little skewer bolt across a couple of rooms. Jan and Bree have a lot of fun playing with it. Jan does his best to inculcate respect for the eye-poking potential of the little device. Avoiding the cats also requires some care.
This summer, Jan submitted a proposal for a new emoji. There’s a technology standards group that picks new emoji, and the process to submit new emoji ideas is open to the public.
Lots of people like to write things in emoji, but Jan thought it was a shame there was no emoji to represent the first-person “I” or “me”. To remedy this, he proposed a new emoji showing a person pointing at themselves. An acquaintance of his who studies written languages helped round out the proposal with history of real written languages that have used glyphs of this exact gesture for thousands of years.
Alas, the committee that reviews emoji proposals isn’t particularly interested in this. They pass on this idea in favor of adding a few more fruit and vegetable emojis.
Inspired by the recent movie Dune, Bree and Jan begin inventing a family sign language. In Dune, the royal House Atreides family employs a secret sign language to issue warnings and commands to their relatives and staff.
Bree and Jan decide to make up some signs for a secret House Miksovsky sign language. The first two signs are: 1) “Angela/Mommy has made a bad joke again”, and 2) “Please give me a backrub.”
Bree is now a millimeter taller than Angela, which means that Angela is now the shortest member of the family. This is particularly exciting to see because, as a toddler, Bree was in the 5th percentile of height, and some projections showed she might never break 5 feet in height.
Jan takes Lyn out to lunch for her birthday. He gets driving directions to the restaurant, Cafe Campagne, which is downtown at Pike Place Market. Google Maps plots an unusual route that involves going down the Highway 99 tunnel that leads deep underneath downtown Seattle.
In the middle of the tunnel, Google Maps indicates, “You have arrived at your destination!” Sort of — while our little map dot is indeed at the restaurant’s map longitude and latitude, we were not at the same altitude. The car was in fact 100 feet directly below the restaurant.
Bree is making boats for her school’s annual Engineering Event. Boats make a welcome change from the event’s somewhat repetitive focus on rubber band-powered wheeled vehicles.
Each student builds at least one rig according to a plan provided by the school, and must make at least one other at home. Jan suggests trying to make a steam-powered pop-pop boat. Bree’s up for this, so the two of them spend a Saturday morning cutting up aluminum cans and other junk to make pop-pop boats.
Sadly, none of the boats they make work. They do hear water boiling inside the little boat’s boilers, and see some movement of gas bubbles in the tubes that run underneath the boats. But none of the boats make the characteristic pop-pop sound, nor do they move forward.
We celebrate that famous annual holiday, National Give Your 3rd Kid Books Day.
On a Sunday back in September, Bree was waiting in Angela’s office at the church. She decided to scribble a note on Angela’s church calendar identifying November 16 as “National Give Your 3rd Kid Books Day”.
Fast forward a couple of months, and November 16 comes around. Bree is delighted to receive a pile of books from both Angela and Jan. Bree’s grandmother, Lyn, likes the idea of the holiday too, and not only gives a book to Bree to celebrate the day, but also sends some books to her own third child, Skye.
Liya and Anya return home for Thanksgiving! We’re very happy to have them back for a week.
Bree’s school holds its annual Engineering Event. It’s too bad we can’t attend in person.
Jan’s sister Skye and her family come up from Salem to stay with us over Thanksgiving. After they arrive, Bree’s cousins Leif and Auden are playing with her when one of them asks, “Where’s Bree?” Bree’s appearance has changed so much — she’s taller, has much shorter hair, and wears glasses — that they hadn’t recognized her.
Skye’s family is followed shortly by Chris and Julie arriving from Bend. We host a fondue dinner for everyone at our house. We have to add two desk tables to our dining room table to make room for 12 people!
Happy Thanksgiving! From left to right: Leif, Skye, Bree, Liya, Angela, Lyn, Anya, Chris, Julie, Jared, and Auden.
Jan, Lyn, and Skye’s family go to Carkeek Park to see the chum salmon running.
We attend a performance by comedian Trevor Noah at Seattle Center. Liya’s friend, Phoebe, joins us for the evening.
These days Bree likes writing fanfic: stories using characters and settings from existing works of fiction. Fanfics often cover new “ships” (romantic relationships) between two characters that often don’t have such a relationship in the primary fiction work. As a writing prompt for Bree, Anya picks two random characters from the manga/anime, My Hero Academia, and challenges Bree to create a fanfic based on a romantic relationship between them. Bree happily accepts the challenge.
Jan takes advantage of a sunny break in a very rainy November to harvest our kiwi. This is about 33 pounds of kiwi, and will take a few weeks to ripen. Jan and Liya only just finished using up last year’s harvest with a final batch of kiwi ice cream.
Homeowner fun: being awakened at 4:00 am by the sound of water inside the house. Angela and Jan hear ominous water sounds coming from the master bathroom. The sounds are loud — not little drips, but a lot of water. They investigate to discover water cascading from underneath a cabinet door onto the floor. Some fixture under a sink has burst.
A flurry of activity follows: shutting off the water main, vacuuming up the water with a shop vac, mopping up the rest with towels, and hanging everything out to dry. Water has also dripped through the floor into the dining room below, so there’s that to clean up as well.
Thankfully, we’re able to isolate the leak and restore water to the rest of the house, so we’re only down one sink instead needing to move out of the house.