There was a giant full moon over the Berkeley hills last night. We set off a sparkler in front of the house to ward off bad luck in the New Year. Peabody didn’t set Nettie on fire, so it looks like it’s working!
This week a pipe broke down the street and we were without water for most of the day. Annabel and the kids survived on bottles of Calistoga. But we’re prepared for something bigger. We have 80 gallons of water stored in case of emergency. According to FEMA, that’s enough for about 10 days for a family of four.
Peabody’s first grade class visited the Zeum in San Francisco to create claymation movies. Stories and characters were put together last week in class and animated at the museum. Peabody’s group came up with a story about friends rescuing a mermaid. It is a silent movie.
Inspired by the 250th anniversary of Guinness and watching Timeline the night before, Annabel baked Nigella Lawson’s Chocolate Guinness Cake in our Nordic Ware castle pan. Much tastier than a Three King’s Cake. Trebuchet!
We don’t celebrate Epiphany in a major way. With both St. Nicholas and Santa Claus visiting us, it would be too much to expect Balthazar, Melchior, and Gaspar to stop by. But we’re always ready to try a new dessert and I’m hoping Annabel might make Three Kings Cake tonight!
Peabody’s after-school carpentry class has been working on bird feeders. The students do all of the work themselves with real tools. Peabody enjoyed hammering, sawing and measuring. He even broke his first drill bit which has become part of the structure. After applying a final coat of varnish at home, we’re ready to start feeding our Towhees, Robins and Scrub Jays.
We brought in the New Year by breaking open Battlelore, a two-player fantasy wargame. The basic game mechanics were easy enough for 7 year old Peabody to handle. He mastered them well enough to repeat Henry V’s victory at Agincourt in the game’s introductory scenario. Set up took about 15 minutes. The actual battle lasted about 45. The action is very fast paced, keeping us both in the game the whole time. Battlelore includes more elaborate rules for fantasy battles. There are several expansions also available. For now Peabody and I will stick with the basic rules, but we’ll be coming back to Battlelore soon.
St. Nicholas filled our shoes with chocolates and gifts last night. He usually brings a Lego Advent calendar for Peabody and a Playmobil calendar for Nettie. We keep them with the Christmas decorations and set them up around the tree. St. Nick left a note with Nettie’s boot saying there were only Pirate and Police calendars from Playmobil this year. Imagine Santa being arrested for breaking and entering or shanghaied elves burying his sack of toys! We’re a little sad about it, but we have plenty of marzipan pigs and chocolate sardines to help us get over it.
Recently I have been reading the Cherry Ames mystery series, about a young nurse in the 1940s. The pink hardcover on the far left of the photo is “Cherry Ames, Department Store Nurse”, the last in the series, the first one I read, and the funniest so far (the department store Santa frequently visits her for aspirin). In the book I just finished, “Cherry Ames, Army Nurse”, Cherry is in the army, making new friends (and enemies) and saving lives. “Cherry did not know what new life she would find [in the Pacific], what new challenges she would face. But whatever it was, she was ready for it!”
For the ilpast couple years, I’ve been playing a Risk clone with friends through GamesByEmail.com. It’s isn’t played in real-time, so you can enter moves whenever you have a moment and your friends don’t need to be online at the same time. It makes it easy to play with people in different time zone. I introduced Nettie and Peabody to the Risk this weekend, It was a short and frustrating game for Peabody as the yellow army quickly overran the blues and reds.