We’re in quite a winter storm this week. Yesterday we had 2 hours of solid lightning and booming thunder. Today, there was a 20 minute set of fiercely heavy rain, followed by 5 solid minutes of HAIL. Not a bit here and there, but basically a crazy hail dumping. Max thought it was great fun. 🙂
This was just so darn pretty I had to put it up for posterity. 🙂
Poppa is having a rough time lately. This latest incident has me thinking he needs to have some remedial ‘safe use of crowbar’ training. He was pulling some nails out at head height and the crowbar slipped off the head of the nail and the other end of crowbar popped Poppa right above the eye. Oh boy. Not to be out done, I also sustained an injury. I have a gnarly splinter in my thumb that won’t come out. It must be 1/32 of an inch long! I have placed the picture of Poppa ‘below the fold’ so if you don’t want to see it, you can close your web browser now. Scroll down for the picture of Poppa. There is no picture of my splinter.
Are you sure?
Last weekend was a multiple-day work weekend, and on Saturday night while Toby was at the movies, Pop tripped going down the stairs (to get a flash light) and injured his finger. He thought he had broken his pinky, it had swollen up to triple size. Max, Lucy and I drove Poppa to the ER where he discovered it was not broken, but dislocated, and badly dislocated. The ER doc administered 10 shots of novacaine, but Poppa said that it still hurt like crazy. But, Poppa is tough, and he worked the next day without any hinderance with his pinky taped to his ring finger for a splint.
On New Year’s Day, 2008, we took some time to do some ‘treasure’ hunting. The D’Elia family turned us on to the fun of GeoCaching. [Geocaching is an activity where someone (the hider) hides something (usually in tupperware) and publishes the latitude and longitude to a website. The seekers then get the coordinates off the website and use a GPS device to find the cache. Most caches consist of a small number of trinkets and a log to sign.] Since we are trying to keep up with the D’Elias, we had to get in on the act and we received a GPS device 
from my parents for Christmas. I downloaded 5-6 geocaches from the website (there are ~25 within 5 miles of our home [N 34 23.889 W 119 31.257] in Carpinteria) and we went exploring. The first one we looked for sounded very easy to find, and so I had hope that we would start off on a high note. I let Max hold the device and keep us going in the right direction, he liked following the little black arrow. The device has about a 13′ accuracy so we began looking around for likely hiding spots. I had to duck down to reach the container and Lucy came up behind me. When I pulled up the container, I popped her in the nose with my elbow and gave her a bloody nose that streamed down her face. She immediately wiped her nose with her sleeve and red streaks appeared on her cheeks. Toby picked her up and got blood all over the front of her shirt. Luckily we had a Kleenex and within a few minutes the blood stopped. Lucy did not like having the tissue plug in her nostril. I took Lucy back to the car and Toby signed the log of our first geocache and re-hid it for the next person to find. Once Lucy had calmed down, we decided to try for another one on the other side of town. This cache was not so specific, so we spent about 5-10 minutes hunting in the grass within our 13′ radius. We finally found it and everyone had a good time! We will definitely become serious geocache-ers in the future. It is a great family activity.
Update : I looked at the entry for ‘Quiet Marsh’ and it is very specific, I just missed the details.