Lemonade

 

Yesterday, Daddy and I set up a little business selling lemonade to passers by. We juiced some lemons from our tree, used the secret lemonade recipe, and set up a stand. Our marketing strategy was to maximize cuteness. I would wave happily at all passing cars, bikes, and pedestrians and wait for customers to roll in. It was a very successful strategy. I made nine whole dollars! I even got one repeat customer--a German woman in a Mercedes. She was my first customer and then came by a bit later for seconds. I had a lot of fun. After we finished I told Daddy that we should definitely do it again.

Football-A Tool for Learning

Sunday afternoon. It's football season and there were lots of good games on. It's interesting how many different things are going on during the game. Since we got Madden for the Wii, I'm starting to make sense of more of what is going on. I spotted wide receivers running curls routes. I spotted a halfback blast. I spotted a defense in cover 2.

To get a better sense of what was happening on the field and to slow things down, we got out the vibrating football players and set up various formations and plays. I can now tell you the difference between the strong and weak side of the line. I can tell when the quarterback is in shotgun versus lined up under center. I know what a blitz is.

There's a fair bit of reading in Madden. When I first started out, I found a couple of plays that worked and just stuck with them. Lately, though, I've been expanding my playbook and learning all sorts of new words--blast, pitch, toss, counter, streaks, slants, and so on. While reading is not all that interesting in general, I can see how it is useful for beating Daddy at Madden. One last thing I learned--the Raiders are a truly horrible team. I beat them with my Steelers by a score of 55-0 on Saturday.

Tree Guys

 

Probably a lot of you have read about the tree guys living near the stadioum at Berkeley. They finally got kicked out last week. here are there final moments before being houled off to jail. Basically, the cops build a scaffold platform below them and chased them all the way up to the top of the tree. You can see the four guys hanging on at the very top of the tree. (The structure at the apex is the "crow's next" that the protesters built in the tree.)

Unfortunately, while the tree guys are gone, a whole lot of crazy guys have decided to live on the median strip in the street in front of the stadium. This is also the street in front of Daddy's work. The City of Berkeley thinks that living in the median strip constitutes freedom of speech, so they aren't kicking these guys off just yet. Here's a median strip guy with a feather trying to offer insights to a TV guy during the standoff.

 

Solo

I did it. Today I managed my first solo bike ride. After a few times I started to get very confident and did a number of tricks including hockey stops with the bike close to Mommy. Bike riding is really fun! Check out some of my exciting videos:

Video 1: A close shave for Mommy


Video 2: A perfect run

Trebuchet

 

Last weekend, we continued the tradition of Romans v Barbarians by building a trebuchet out of tinkertoys. Actually, the design was inspired by a Mythbusters episode where they turned a bucket-lift into a kind of similar siege weapn by resting it on some enromous shipping containers and flinging Buster out. We got the trbuchet to flig stuff reasonably far though it wasn't very stable.

Big step. two wheels!

A Bike Ride
Originally uploaded by Enzo D.

After spending a lot of time looking at Mommy's back during our visit to Cambridge, it's time to start riding a bike on my own. I really liked riding around while we were there, and Daddy has the idea that we're going to ride to school once I get the hang of it. So...two days ago Daddy took off the training wheels for my bike. I was not at all sure this was such a good idea, but Daddy insisted. We went out in the back yard to ride around--on grass initially so that I wouldn't get hurt in any falls. I also put on my "armor"--knee pads, elbow pads, helmet, long pants, and so on. And off we went. The first day, I managed a few brief little runs without Daddy holding the seat. today was even better, I made it all the way across the yard on my own. That was a big step. I think I'm getting the hang of this.