As one would expect of a four-year-old boy, Anthony has a keen interest in rockets. If it wasn't clear enough the other day when he explained to me in detail how the space shuttle launched (see the middle of this post), it was clear today when we shot off a model rocket.

I was into model rocketry when I was a kid, so I thought to share that experience a bit with him. Yesterday we bought an Estes starter kit and built one of the rockets, and today we went to a park to shoot it off. (I used to shoot them off in the fields at my folks' place, but 25 years has added a lot of height and bulk to the surrounding trees, so I worried that we'd lose the rocket on the first launch.)

I set up everything for launch, then while I held down the fire-permit button on the fire controller with one hand (and the camera with the other), Anthony counted down and pressed the launch button.

As luck would have it, it landed very close, so he rushed right over and was simply unable to contain his excitement. He jumped up and down, pumped his arms, and cheered with abandon.

The tissue that protects the parachute landed quite a bit further away, so he went off to get it.

He's wearing the same shirt today as he did in this post from March, but this time it's backwards instead of inside out :-).

I love to capture him in his “unbridled joy” state, as I did here and in the links in the “Followups and related posts” section below.

Two days ago I posted a review of a new GPS unit, and yesterday I posted some photos of a soaking wet bird that I took during a storm. Little did I know at the time, but those posts were destined to become related.

It seems that the large tree shown at the left in this picture on the GPS-related post was blown down by the storm of the wet-bird post:

The tree was an old, crotchety mulberry tree that had seen better days. When I was a kid, it was glorious, both fun to climb and producing a lot of mulberries that I'd use to give myself a bellyache every summer.

It was sad to see it down, but it needed to be cleared up, so Dad went to do it, and I hung around and took pictures (yet, magnanimously, occasionally interrupting to offer unsolicited advice).

Dad cut off a huge branch, chained it to the trusty old backhoe he's had for 30 years, and dragged it off into the woods.

Half way there, the branch started digging into the ground, so we heaved and ho'ed until we rolled it over to its more leafy side, and then he continued dragging it toward the woods. (The branch and backhoe are in the background in the center of the picture below.)

Once in the woods, the branch was unhooked from the backhoe and he shoved it out of the way.

One way to turn the front wheels of the backhoe sharply without ripping up the grass or placing undue stress on the steering mechanism is to simply push the front bucket down far enough that it lifts the front tires off the ground.

Returning to the tree, he used the backhoe to shove the tree the rest of the way off the stump, rolling it over so that another big branch would be safer to cut off.

The cut is only about half way through, but a huge amount of wood is on the branch above the cut, leaning out with leverage placing a massive amount of pressure on the wood that remains. He then just shoved the tree with the backhoe, and the huge branch came crashing down. (The photo below is mid-crash.)

Doing it this way is much safer than cutting all the way through, since it allows you to be well away from the tree when the big branch comes down. I guess Dad learned a thing or two growing up on a farm.

The branch was dragged to the woods, and he returned to work on the main trunk.

After notching it from above and below, and from one side, leaving the trunk connected to the upper branches by only a small cross-section of wood, he pressed on the joint with the backhoe to complete the break. That didn't work, so he tried lifting one end, hoping to snap it where it was notched...

That didn't work either, so he put that task aside and cut off another huge branch. During that cut, the chainsaw got stuck in the cut, so we had to pound a wedge (four of them, actually) into the cut to release the pinching pressure enough to extract the chain saw.

Half an hour wasted with the stuck chainsaw behind us, he dragged that branch to the woods.

The very base of the tree consisted of a ring of healthy wood surrounding a core of what might best be described as a mix between swiss cheese and cork. It had the load-bearing properties of wet tissue.

Back from the woods, he used the backhoe to again roll the remains of the tree such that the trunk was safe to cut through completely, and he headed off to the woods with it.

It's on days like today that the backhoe is worth its weight in gold.

He then chains the entire rest of the tree to the backhoe, lifts, and heads to the woods for a fifth time.

Following a sixth trip to the woods with the backhoe's front loader filled with the remaining assorted branches and twigs, we're done for now; He'll do something with the stump another day.

After unsticking the chain saw that one time, the cut still had a couple of wedges in it, so Dad couldn't use the chainsaw to finish the cut. He used the backhoe to essentially rip the branch from the tree, at which point neither of us thought to pick up the wedges. I remembered them later, and spent five unsuccessful minutes looking for them before spending another minute to grab our metal detectors, with which we found them in about 30 seconds.

All in all, it took Nature a lot of years (100?) to grow the tree, a storm a few seconds to bring it down, and Dad about two hours and fifteen minutes to clear it away (which includes 30 minutes futzing with the stuck chainsaw). I shudder to think how long it would have taken to clear it without the backhoe, or even worse, without a chainsaw either.

It certainly pays to have the right tools for the job.

Anthony is always saying things that are surprising or interesting (to us, at least) for one reason or another, and today he had a couple of gems.

We were doing our God Blesses before bed, and he said that he wanted to do a special God Bless for Mommy in Japan. Our normal pattern is that I say something that he then repeats, so the conversation went like this:

Me:	A super God bless for Mommy in Japan...
Anthony:	I don't want to do the one that you say, because I love Mommy more a super lot.
Me:	Oh, okay, well, say what you like!
Anthony:	God bless Mommy super super super super super super super super suuuuuuuuuuuuuper super suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuper....  (long pause)   I forgot what I say after that.

We eventually worked it out 🙂

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The other one that struck me is that while we were making a “space ship” out of a cardboard box, I remembered having seen news of a recent Space Shuttle launch, so I thought to show him some pictures of a Space Shuttle launch. I pulled up some shots with my web image viewer, and eventually found a nice one showing the Shuttle on the launch pad, with the two solid boosters on the side of the big external tank.

I started to tell him how the people were in the part that looked like airplane, and that the other parts were... at which point he interrupted me. “I know daddy,” he said as he pointed to the two solid booster rockets, “those two parts go away like this....” He then brought his hands together as if in prayer, then quickly peeled them apart to the sides, exactly how any adult who has seen a video of a Space Shuttle launch would describe how the solid boosters fall away.

He then pointed to the big external tank and the shuttle itself, and proceeded to explain how the big tank would fall away a bit later, again, using his hands exactly how any adult would do it.

I was shocked. Where do kids learn these things?! I asked, and he said that he saw it in a book. Wow.

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Despite Anthony being the smartest kid in the world :-), other kids have their own surprising moments. A few days ago, my brother and his wife (the ones who welcomed their second child two days ago were snuggling with their two-year-old, Grace, and asked her about something they had never discussed before: “Grace, do you know your last name?”

She had no idea what they were talking about, so they told her “Your last name is Friedl,” at which point her eyes brightened up and she said “Oh, Friedl!   F · R · I · E · D · L.   Friedl.”

At just a bit over two years old, Grace is much too young to be able to spell, so her parents were stunned and dumbfounded, to put it mildly. (“We both about fell off the bed.”)

Of course, anyone with the last name “Friedl” knows that you're forever having to spell it for people (who want to write Friedle, Friedel, or any of a number of other misspellings), and Grace had obviously overheard her parents spell it over the phone a thousand times during her short life.

This perhaps also explains how after spelling her last name and repeating it again, she then recited their phone number. (Wow!!!)

My first reaction upon hearing the story was to suggest asking her whether she knows of a cure for cancer.

I posted the other day about the wet and scruffy birds that I fed on a stormy day earlier this week. I'd not gotten any pictures until after the storm, when they'd started to dry off, so they didn't look as wet and messy in the pictures as they had during the storm.

Well, yesterday was another storm and another day of working with the laptop on the veranda, but this time I brought out the camera during the storm, and although it was quite dark and gloomy (it was a thunderstorm, after all), I got some scruffy-wet bird pictures.

I had a difficult time trying to get a good shot, not only due to the lack of light, but because I was using a new monopod and a new focusing screen on my camera, and was not yet used to either. Those are among the camera toys I'm stocking up on this trip that I plan to write about soon (having started the “camera toys” series with my post the other day about a new GPS unit).

My brother Mike and his wife Chickee welcomed their second child last night, little Luke Allan Friedl (8 lbs, 21.5 inches; pics). He arrived after a difficult 12+ hour labor. Mommy is exhausted but doing well, as are Mike and Luke. Waiting at home is Luke's big sister, two-year-old Grace.

(Luke's middle name, Allan, is a name from Chickee's side of the family; her Grandpa and Uncle's).

Congrats, Mike and Chickee!