We just heard from the new owner of the Time Machine. Donald is doing a complete refit. It will look great with a new paint topsides.
The rudder of my dreams. The design for this is based on Bill’s rudder on Wing and a Prayer. It is firmly mounted in a (break away) sleeve but can be raised out of danger to operate in shallow water or pushed deep for maximum performance.
Ronin inherits her mother’s obsession with Star Wars characters. It has occurred to us that it will relatively easy to arrange for it to be her first movie as well.
Sometimes, when Ronin is extra fussy I like get all Micheal Jackson on her and dangle her out the window. She calms right down. Hopefully she’s thinking “Ahhh, fresh air…. Ooooh look at the trees” and not simply comatose with fear. The tracks are from touching her feet in the snow while trying to teach her “cold.” It’s not working. Maybe because she can’t make any of those sounds and it’s impossible to do the sign while I’m holding her over the ledge.
“Hot” she has down, or at least she knows that it has something to do with the things on the stove. This might be her first verbal word where it’s clear that she is attaching the right meaning to it. Probably due to lots of repetition during the making of the morning coffee.
Her other word is dog which comes out with only a hint of the g. She has always liked to watch the dogs in the park, but it was bumped up a notch after her encounter with Charlotte. Who introduced herself with an enthusiastic lick to the face. Ronin was stunned into silence. The second kiss made her cry and Charlotte was banished to the bedroom.
It must have stuck in her mind though because she took it more or less in stride when Cody did the same thing a few days later. We expected Cody to stay well clear of Ronin but they turned out to be friends. The only tension occurred around the table when Cody seemed to think she might be competition for table scraps. And she might be. Even though she’s usually indifferent to food, put her in a room with a dog dish and she goes right for it and stuffs her mouth with little greasy nuggets.
I think we’re staying in for Christmas. We’d need chains (and a shovel) to even leave our parking spot. We haven’t tried too hard to buy any but I suspect that every place in Portland is sold out of chains anyway.
Ro poses with a neighbor’s snowman. We have around six inches of snow with a hard frozen crust on the top. It started snowing again about an hour ago and is coming down pretty steadily and piling up again. I don’t think we could move our car if we tried. Mostly because if we were to manage to get past the frozen-shut doors, we would discover that the emergency brake is frozen in place (oops).
We walked to Laurelhurst park and watched the kids sledding down the hills. Ronin was pretty fascinated with the kids and dogs but was very suddenly done with the cold and we beat a hasty retreat. It’s hard to play with her in the snow because she doesn’t have the presence of mind to keep her clothes in place and would get cold way too fast.
* WARNING! * Grandparents: NOT a video of Ronin.
