Happy Thanksgiving

 I love watching the Halloween pumpkins evolve.

Nim did some evolving this week too, with her new haircut.

She manages to look much more edgy than I ever do.  It's a good cut, despite only costing $12 at the independent local haircut place downtown.

We were invited over to Todd and Sarah's for Thanksgiving this year, leaving us free to goof off and ride our bikes earlier in the day.  Since Nim was seeming strong I suggested Mt. Hamilton.

!!

Hamilton is about a 4500 foot climb.  Kiddo wanted to ride under her own power rather than on the tandem.  We opted to drop Chad off at the base of the hill, and she and I started at Joe Grant County Park, about a third of the way up, as she really wanted to make it up to the top and figured that a mere 3000 feet of climbing might be feasible :)

Cheery kid at the start.

Tired, but still cheery kid reinflating her energy with cookies from the vending machine at the top.  Despite going into death march mode and gritting out the last mile on sheer determination, she made it up, and was an entertaining person for me to talk to all the way up (i.e. goofy and interesting rather than complaining).  Yay kiddo!

Later that evening, she ran around maniacally with Todd and Sarah's kids and still had the inclination to give Chad a hug :)  A big turkey dinner and multiple pieces of pie must have helped.  Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Existensial Musings

Hello, world. Today, I discovered a particular interest in musing on the fundamentals of human existence.

And, oh, yeah; I got my hair cut.

Happy Halloween

Yes, we did Halloween, in a half-hearted last-minute sort of way.  Monday afternoon found me trying to clean things up a bit, cook dinner for us and Sarah and her kids, and frantically start scooping out pumpkins at 5 pm with a hand that was still a bit sore from the previous week's yard carnage.  Needless to say, the pumpkins were not as carefully designed as they have been in previous years, but they were still properly Halloween-y.

Normally, after Halloween, we move the pumpkins onto the back patio so that we can enjoy them during dinner for the next couple of days, and then watch them rot/melt over the next couple of weeks.  This year, they clearly aren't scary enough to repel the squirrels; we get to watch the pesky critters *eat* them this time around.  I've seen up to four at a time, and probably should just give up and toss the pumpkins in the compost bin.

(Kids did go trick-or-treating -- Nimue and Cathryn used little Scott needing an escort as their justification to extort candy from the neighbors.  Recycled costumes from last year, and I just now realized that no one bothered to take pictures of the kids!  Clearly everyone is growing out of it.)

New Glasses

Nim recently started complaining that she was having a hard time seeing well when she reads or works on detailed art projects.  I assumed this was just a return of her far-sightedness, so made an appointment with the eye doctor.

As the eye exam progressed, it became clear that it wasn't that simple.  She's not particularly far-sighted.  She's not at all near-sighted.  What she does have is a "fixation disparity" -- in other words her eyeballs don't always track perfectly together.  The difference is slight; you can't see that they aren't pointed together, but it does make it harder to focus on things, especially at the end of the day when one is tired.  Fortunately, there is an easy fix for this with the right glasses.  So, fancy new glasses with a prism correction were ordered.

What was really funny was her reaction walking around downtown Mountain View after picking up the new glasses.  I expected the general "Whoa -- everything is in focus!" reaction.  What I didn't expect was the further description "No, I mean everything, really everything, is in focus, and not just the stuff in the plane that I am trying to look at.  There's no double vision in the background. It's soooooooo weird!!!!"

Apparently the kiddo has had doubled vision in the background, or in planes other than what she tries to focus on, basically for as long as she can remember.  She thought it was normal.  Bad mom never sussed this one out...nor did the eye doctor until now....