Good morning all.
Steve took the jedis to church. I had the WORST night. I was up at 2am and couldn't get back to sleep till around 5am. I had a splitting headache that I thought the cholesterol medicine would help but it only made it worse. A couple of aspirins finally did the trick, but took forever.
I hope everyone has had a merry Christmas and a happy New Year? We've done a lot of just stuff together. It's been so mild and nice that yesterday we even went for a long bike ride in the park. Wonderful.
Matthew got a Pave Hawk model for Christmas and he's been working on it with Steve. They got a Cranium "Cadoo" game also and have been playing it (not me...I'm not big into board games. I just keep the popcorn coming.)
We FINALLY got ROTK all watched. I'm glad they put more of Eowyn into the story, but of course it wasn't enough for me. I read the whole story of her and Faramir to Steve last night, just so he could know what was REALLY going on behind the scenes!
School starts tomorrow.
This has also been the first semester that we've actually seen a "problem" with Steve going to school all the time. It's a good thing he's almost done.
It's not noticable with Joshua, but it is with Matthew. Matthew doesn't do what Steve says right away. It's not anything awful, like direct disobedience...hard to explain, but it's more like anxiety! Steve will tell him to do something and Matthew will get anxious and then say "I better ask Mom." Steve has to stop him, reassure him and then make him follow through!
I see it as highly "fixable" as Steve spends more time with him. Trust is re-established and all. Steve has patiently worked on it all this week that he's been off. It's gotten better just in this short time.
Still, it's a good thing he's almost done. I imagine soldiers who come home after long deployments must have something like this to contend with?
Here's the only knife I ever found. I was helping Marl run the Bloomfield Open Hunt dressage show, and since the teenage volunteers never showed up (as usual), I was bringing in test sheets from the dressage rings.
I was walking back past some of the stables when I noticed a small chip of reddish barn-wood in a dried-up tire rut. My brain went into Monk-mode (even though the show did not exist yet), and told me the chip of wood was out of place, since there were no red barns there. I kicked it free from the dirt, and noticed it was an extremely precisely-shaped piece of wood.
That told me to pick it up. It took a few seconds for me to realize it was a mud-caked Swiss Army knife, a Wenger, in fact, because of the square recess where the shield once was. I don't know how many trucks and trailers ran over it, or people and horses stepped on it, but I was the only one who recognized it as a knife.
It must have been there for weeks or months, because the innards were caked with mud as hard as concrete. Hours of blasting it with my ultrasonic cleaner took off the surface mud, but didn't touch the stuff inside. It was impossible to open any of the blades.
Over the course of six months, I'd pour penetrating oil onto the pivot points, and eventually the main blade started to open a bit. I kept at it until I could get the blade halfway open.
From there on, I attacked the mud-concrete with dental picks. That, and more ultrasonic blasting, got enough junk out to start slowly working on each blade. It's now as cleaned-up as I can possibly get it, and everything works, but not too smoothly.
The plastic is all hacked-up, the aluminum liners are somewhat corroded, and the polish on the blades is shot. But it can still take an edge, and still do what it was intended to do.