Sailing

 

On Saturday, we went sailing again. Since it is rainy season, there is a lot of water in a nearby creek creating pretty good conditions. Unfortunately, there's not much current in the creek, so the boats mainly go where the wind takes them. Still, there was lots of excitement. There is a portion of the stream where things get narrow and end in a small waterfall. Several of the boats "shot the rapids" and went down the waterfall. Boats are not much good after this experience, but it's so cool to watch them pick up speed and slide down.

R/C Car Racing

Daddy and I got a really cool R/C car for Christmas. It's ridiculously powerful and fast. It also has all terrain tires so that it can go over rough ground with ease. Lately, Daddy and I have been playing tag with the cars. He uses one of my older cars, a green outer space type vehicle, while I use the new one. His vehicle is more agile but slower while mine is fast but harder to maneuver. Our favorite game is car tag. The "it" car has to chase the other around the yard to tag it, at which point the process reverses. It's quite nifty to go chasing one another around the yard.

One time during a chase, my car went at top speed over a tree root which acted as a kind of jump. It got huge air and ended up doing a barrel roll in midair before landing on its wheels and continuing the chase. Another highlight was when I drove on 2 wheels up a ramp formed by my scooter. This produced an amazing jump into the wood chips.

R/C car racing is a total blast.

Pinewood Derby

 

It's pinewood derby season once again. I wanted to choose the thinnest possible design so as to be more aerodynamic. I noticed that thin designs seemed to dominate last year's Blackhawk 500 (the regional pinewood race). So this year's entry is the Pikachu-mobile. It's nice and yellow (though lots of graphites dirties it a bit). I was excited for race day. Things went well in the heats. I wond 3 out of 5 races I competed in.

Then disaster struck. Normally, the 5 fastest cars compete in the finals. This year, however, they screwed up the computer settings and only ran the top 3. Despite desperate pleadings from Mommy and Daddy and other parents whose kids were "on the bubble," they didn't end up fixing this, so I did not get to compete in the finals. That made me really upset since my car was the 5th fastest in the heats and would have been a strong contender in the finals. Still, we did pretty well finishing 5th overall.

Rocketing off to heaven

In Sunday school, they introduced the concept of Bible bucks. These are rewards you earn for memorizing various Bible verses. I've accumulated quite a lot of Bible bucks and finally decided to spend them on something. I got a water powered rocket. You fill the rocket with a little water and then pressurize it with air. When you release the pressure, the rocket flies high into the sky. In fact, it flew out of the yard on the first go. Fortunately, Mommy retrieved it before a car ran over it. It flies amazingly high!

Nerf Gun Wars

This last couple of weekends, Daddy and I have been having Nerf gun battles out in the yard. These are super-exciting. I always make a point to choose the Nerf machine gun, so I have rapid fire capability. Daddy chooses the rifle and the pistols. The rifle is accurate but doesn't shoot as quickly. It's so exciting running around and trying to get a good shot in. Daddy is so fast that it's difficult to get a good shot when he's on the run. Better to wait until he's still or surprise him. Nerf guns are awesome!

Card Tricks

I got a library book filled with card tricks this week. On Friday night, Mommy went out to a fancy dinner, so it was guys' night. Rather than reading stories, we decided to have a magic show. Daddy figured out the tricks from the book and taught several of them to me. Then, on Saturday morning, I tried the mind reading trick on Mommy---it worked perfectly. I love magic.

Hot Wheels Long Jump

This weekend, we rediscovered an old classic--Hot Wheels Long Jump. This is an amazing racecourse where cars have to jump over a city (!) to make it around the track. We've had a bunch of competitions and surprisingly, Mater won one of the championships!

Bible Project Update

We've now finished with the history of the kings of Israel. It was a huge surprise that Israel was defeated and sent off to Babylon. I really hope they make a comeback. We just started on the book of Ezra and things are starting to look up, but we'll have to see. The Bible is sooooo interesting. It's my favorite bedtime reading.

Celebi celebration

Today, Pokemon Black/White goes on sale. To get people (like me) even more excited about this event, local Gamestop stores are running a Celebi celebration. If you bring your DS and Pokemon games into the store, then they beam the legendary Pokemon Celebi onto each cartridge. Now Celebi is extremely rare, in fact you cannot catch him in the wild, so I was super excited about this. A few weeks ago, Celebis were available in San Jose, but this was too far to persuade my parents to drive. Fortunately, Gamestop is not all the far away.

Anyway, I'm so happy to have Celebi. When I got home, I took out one of my Pokemon games and took Celebi to the forest shrine in Ilex. There, a time travel event was triggered, and I got to defeat the head of Team Rocket three years BEFORE the Pokemon adventure even started. Time travel is really mind blowing.

Talent Show

The talent show is only a couple of weeks away. We're busy rehearsing each week. This year, I'm doing "Soak up the Sun" by Sheryl Crow. I changed some the lyrics so they are more meaningful to me and other third graders. For instance, the first verse of the original song goes: "My friend the Communist holds meetings in his RV. I can't afford his gas, so I'm stuck here watching TV." My version is:

My friend from Alamo. He likes to go to movies. I can't afford to go, so I'm stuck here playing Wii.

It's a fun song to sing. I really like it.

Odyssey

This past Saturday was Odyssey of the Mind. This was the first year we were competing for prizes, so I was all charged up. We had to make a Rube Goldberg device, so the team came up with a clever idea. Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, wanted a new perfume sprayer, so Artemis and Hermes went down to Earth to find an inventor to make one for her. It was so successful that they decided to tell the world about it. My job was to be the media guy. I created a video ad using my camera and tripod as well as a magazine ad for the product, the Perfumer3000. I even made up a website and 800 number. (Must be 18 years or older to order.)

The device itself consisted of a tennis ball rolled down a tube into a suspended crystal ball. The tennis ball would knock the crystal ball like a pendulum. It would then hit a water balloon, which would fall thereby lifting up some rubber tubing causing water to spray out. At least that was the theory. Unfortunately, we never got to run the device since we ran out of time in the presentation. That was a big disappointment. So we came away with no medals.

In good news, we had a party at our house afterward and got to eat a lovely chocolate cake.

Blue and Gold

This Friday we had the annual blue and gold dinner at Cub Scouts. It was a Hawaii theme, so I was decked out in my shell leis. I also got my trophy for coming first in the pinewood derby. I really like getting trophies, but I was a little disappointed in this one. For one thing, it wasn't as big as I would have liked. In fact, it was no bigger than the participant trophies. Also, they misspelled my name on the trophy. It lists "Aiden Morgan" as the first prize recipient. Still, I had fun. I also won a solar powered flashlight in the raffle.

Duck Island

 

I had a bath last night. Now baths are okay. I still don't like washing my hair, but I can live with it. The best part is doing fun stuff in the tub. Anyway, yesterday I made this duck island. Since the washcloth was pretty dry, I found that it floated like an island. I put some ducks on it and had them float around. I was so excited that I called Mom and Dad in to have a look and shoot a picture. This was really cool. The ducks floated on the island for a long time.

Markets

 
Every month we have a market day in school. On this day, kids are free to bring stuff to sell in exchange for tickets, a sort of currency in our class. Today, I brought in lemonade to sell. To get people interested, I set the price really low at first, only 5 tickets. Then, when I got word of mouth out about how good the lemonade was, I ended my "sale" period and raised the price to 10, then 20, and finally 50 tickets per cup. I sold out completely and made a boatload of money. So what did I buy with this newfound cash? Well, one of my classmates was selling her stuffed peregine falcon. I got him for only 50 tickets. I also got a pair of toy cars for just 10 tickets each. I got some silly bandz for 1 ticket each. SinceI don't care much for silly bandz, my plan is to "flip" them next time since they usually sell for about 5 tickets. I love the market.

Investments

This weekend Mom and I went to Target and I made some additional investments in my plush Pokemon collection. They had several cool stuffies that were so cute I couldn't resist them. Of course, my first instinct was to ask Mom if she'd buy them for me. She reminded me that I had my own money, so I plunked down cash to bring home the cuties. I'm glad I did.

Chinese Food

I took out a book on Chinese cooking from the library so I could learn more about how to make Chinese food. This week Mom and I have been making different recipes. I really like helping to prepare the meals. We made fried wontons stuffed with pork and ginger. We also made long life noodles with prawns. Tonight we're making spring rolls. Homemade Chinese food is delicious--even better than the stuff in the restaurants.

The Bible Project: Update

We're making great progress in reading the Bible. It's so cool and exciting. We just finished 2nd Samuel this morning. Right now, David is the king of Israel. He's had so many adventures: dealing with Saul, switching sides and joining the Philistines, switching sides again to Judah, dealing with his son Absalom taking over. Just amazing.

Sailing

 
Saturday wss a perfect day for sailing, so we went off to Walnut Creek for a paper regatta. We made 6 boats: The Tide, The Fire, The Bee, The Yoshi Egg, The Rainbow, and The Leaf. Each boat had a different flag. One had a Japanese flag while the others had custom original flags that I made up. Each boat also had a driver. Some of the drivers included Archie the Artichoke, Alien, Sammy the Snake, and Rapunzel. Off they went down the stream. There was a nice current and some wind so the boats went on lots of adventures. The fire got sutck on the opposite bank, but some helpful ducks made enough splashes nearby to set it free. It was awesome.

Pinewood Derby

 
Just over a week ago, the Pinewood Derby was held. My chief mechanic (Mom) and I worked to build the fastest car ever. It is the gold one in the picture above. We worked very hard for maximum speed. We sanded the wheels (one of them melted and we had to get a replacement), polished the axles, and put all sorts of weights toward the back of the car to just hit the weight limit. Within my bear pack, I won a couple of races and came in second as well. That got me to the overall finals where I competed against the best cars from the whole troop. My car finished first in the finals--I was the fastest overall car at the derby! Now, it's on to the Blackhawk 500, the regional pinewood event. I am speed!

Lemonade Stand

 
It was a beautiful weekend this weekend, sunny and in the 70s. A perfect time to open my first lemonade stand of 2011. On SAturday night, Daddy and I went out and bought lemons and cups. We got up early on Sunday and made our first batch, then set up shop on the corner to attract people going to church, walkers, joggers, and bicyclists. I ramped up the marketing a couple of ways. First, I made three signs to place around the neighborhood advertising the stand. Then, I put on my Hines Ward shirt and got out my two football helmets to tie in to "Super Bowl Style" lemonade. I had a lot of good sales pitches. Some of the best were: Stock up now for your Super Bowl party. Lemonade. It's super delicious. I also talked about how it was fresh squeezed and homemade.

Business was brisk. I sold 2 and a half pitchers---about 35 cups. I made about 30 bucks too. I'm really motivated to raise money since Nintendo is bringing out the 3DS protable platform at the end of March. It features a 3D screen that doesn't even need special glasses to produce 3D effects. It also works with my DS games. Unfortunately, it costs $250, so it's pretty expensive. I've set aside mooney for the 3DS fund, including my lemonade money.