Road Trip

Anybody in the near vicinity interested in going to the of Denver Museum of Nature and Science on Sunday, October 15th, please let me know (except Randy, who already has, and suggested the trip in the first place). Ray's B-Day is on the 17th, as if we needed an excuse. No time has been set, so let me know if there are constraints.

On a further note, Ray and I picked up a junked-out telephone this weekend, and we've been working on taking it apart. The speaker is in what looks like a solid plastic housing--epoxy holding it together, I think. We may need to take it outside and bust the thing up with a rock, because there is no way we're not going to see what's in there. Any other suggestions?

I find myself wishing I were a different kind of nerd. Ray likes books, but she only likes books. She's much more interested in movies, for example. What she really loves to do is figure things out, and I just don't love doing that as much as, say, my brother Matt did when he was a kid. That's why we picked up the phone; I remember him taking apart a phone and laying it out in the attic space of an old shed when we were kids. I was making up stories; he was finding out what's in there. Not how it worked, per se, just what was there. So I'm struggling, because I just don't have the gut instincts for it.

As Ray gets older (and as she spends more time at the preschool), I find her exhibiting a tendency to whine and ask for help with things. "I can't do it; you do it for me." "I can't figure it out unless you give me directions." That kind of thing. When, really, she's the kind of person who has more fun figuring it out by herself. I think that either Lee and I or the school have managed to make her afraid of breaking things, and we need to encourage her to take more (considered) risks. Thus, the telephone. And, the museum. Thanks to Randy for the suggestion.