fun in threes, sometimes fours
around the house
We have a lot of big trees in our backyard -- trees that if they fell the wrong way would cause a lot of damage. I tell myself that the root system for such a tree must be massive and must be deep.
Not like this -- a large area but not much depth.
A house I saw on the way home from work experienced one of my greatest nightmares as a homeowner with children...
Hopefully no one got hurt.
We found a little injured friend on the road this evening. He's not much bigger than a bottle cap, and when we first brought him in, placing him in a small basket with a cap of water, he was barely moving, breathing heavily, and keeping his eyes closed.
"It would probably be the merciful thing to just euthanize the poor guy," I said, "rather than let him suffer through the night only to die a painful death."
"No, animals have a way," K assured me.
We will see tomorrow, I suppose.
We had a tremendous hail and rain storm today -- about the worst we've ever had.
Today was so busy that I forgot all about the after picture.
The mystery one street over tonight: why are two police cars parked by the side of the road, lights flashing, tromping about in the woods?
The Boy and I have been listening to Josh Clark's The End of the World podcast, and it opens with a discussion of the Fermi Paradox, which the Boy tried to explain to his friend on the way to the pool this evening.
"See, the universe is millions of years old and..." he began when his friend cut him off: "No, it's only a few thousand years old."
"No," argued the Boy. "It's millions of years old."
"No!" his friend insisted. "It's only a few thousand years old. It's in the Bible."
At this point, I intervened: "Boys, stop arguing -- talk about something else."
On the way home, after dropping off his friend, I explained to the Boy what had happened, giving him a primer on young Earth creationism.
"But it's science!" he insisted incredulously. "There's evidence."
"But they don't accept that evidence," I explained, and he had a hard time understanding how someone doesn't accept evidence. I do too, truth be told. "It's just not worth arguing about because you won't change anyone's mind who thinks that way."
I went ahead and corrected his numbers while I was at it: "The Earth is, in fact, about 4.5 billion years old, and the universe is somewhere in the area of 13 billion years old -- much older than the couple million years you were insisting upon. I didn't correct you then because that would have meant correcting your friend, and I'm not sure how his parents would react to that."
My parents were young Earthers, too (at least for a while), but I'm not sure how they would have reacted to me coming home and announcing that one of my friend's father said indirectly that I was wrong and that the Earth is in fact much older than what they taught me. I don't imagine they would have prevented me from seeing the kid again, but if it had happened again, they might have. And certainly, very fundamentalist Christians would likely make such a move, and the Boy's relationship with his friend is much more valuable to me than what he's been taught about the universe.
The Boy, then, experienced something like what I experience regularly: that sense when among more literalist Christians that we view the world in a completely different way.
The new couch no longer was -- in fact, it was ancient. So ancient I'd stopped thinking of it as "the new couch" years ago. (For reference, I still think of albums bands released 10 years ago as their new album, so...)
We mowed again today: yesterday's mowing was not sufficient because the height of the grass required us to mow at the mower's highest setting yesterday. And since we don't have the sharpest blade in the world, it just pushed some of the grass over and cut the rest.
Today we mowed again. And pulled weeds. A lot of weeds. And put down fertilizer.