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Thursday, May 29th, 2003
I'm building a sandbox for Sylvia and I came up with a pretty neat technique for marking the screw holes. The sides of the box are going to be 2X4's screwed together to make a wall 3½" wide and 7½" tall, with a 2X6 on top to provide a wider ledge. Reducing sanding work requires that I get the boards aligned as well as possible when I am screwing them together. There is an offset in the length of the boards so that the walls will interlock at the corners. So: I made a story stick as long as the length of the walls, excluding the corners. I marked the stick with 6 points, 3 pairs of points about an inch apart and roughly equidistant along the length of the stick. I used my marking gauge to scribe a line down the center of each board and marked the end which will be going into a corner with an "X". Then I transferred the marks from the story stick to each board, working from the end with no "X"; one of each pair I marked "x" and the other "o"; the "x"'s are to be screwed into and the "o"'s are to receive the heads of screws. Each top board got only "o"'s, each bottom board only "x"'s. Now I'm all set to go! The only worrisome point now is that the through holes, those that receive the head of a screw, need to be quite square to the surface of the board. I was thinking I would use the drill press here but on second thought that does not seem to make sense. I believe I will just try my best with the hand drill.
posted afternoon of May 29th, 2003: Respond
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Friday, May 23rd, 2003
Ellen's keeping me up to date -- she just called in to let me know what Sylvia's doing. She started playing with the belt from my bathrobe: "It's a caterpillar." "It's a very long caterpillar." "It's my favorite one." As we were talking Sylvia put the belt around her shoulders and said, "I'm getting ready." Then Ellen put her on the phone, and she laughed and laughed.
posted morning of May 23rd, 2003: Respond
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I had a good time playing with Sylvia yesterday evening -- when I came home she was in a really good mood; we played with her stuffed animals, blocks, trains, etc. for a good two hours. She can stack a very tall pile of blocks before it falls over -- she would not let me count them but I think it must have been 10 or 11 blocks high! Also a long sentence, "My kitty cat is not feeling well."
posted morning of May 23rd, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, May 7th, 2003
So I was varnishing the shoe rack yesterday evening and Sylvia decided she wanted to help -- I figured it would be hard to do it any worse than I would be myself so I said sure. (Finishing is not one of my strong points. Gave her a little art brush and showed her how to dip it and wipe it off before brushing, and she helped for a good long while. And wonder of wonders, no catastrophes! She's about as good at it as I am, I'd say -- no tipping over the varnish, no dipping her hands or other body parts... Just stood there with me, dip, wipe, brush (though I had to remind her pretty frequently to wipe the brush off after dipping), and it came out pretty well. And again, the little grin and "We're making shoe racks!"
posted morning of May 7th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, May 5th, 2003
Yesterday it seems to me Sylvia told me she took a bath with Clifford and his head kept coming off. Which would make some sense, as the head of her Clifford soap container is its lid, and thus removable. However I cannot swear that this actually happened; it may have been a dream image.
posted morning of May 5th, 2003: Respond
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Saturday, May third, 2003
Ellen bought two new soap dispensers, one shaped like Clifford, for the upstairs bathroom, and one with a monkey on it, for the downstairs. Last night Sylvia needed to wash her hands; we were downstairs; I just couldn't figure out how to open up the monkey soap bottle. So after watching me struggle with it for a few minutes, Sylvia let me know, "Clifford soap works".
posted morning of May third, 2003: Respond
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Monday, April 28th, 2003
I put up a hook for the garden hose in our front yard today, and Sylvia helped out, assiduously. [? I wasn't sure what that meant but it somehow suggested itself as the appropriate adverb. Looked it up just now in the dictionary and whaddya know, it fits pretty well. I'll let it stand.] Her description of the activity was, "We're doing shoe rack!" It is up and looks good, though I made a bit of a mistake in the positioning of it. It has two screw holes that are on a vertical axis, and two more that are on a horizontal axis collinear with the lower of the first two; when I was positioning it I was only looking at the lower three holes, didn't realize there was another one, and I put it in a place where that top hole is not near any wood. Oh well -- the three screws should do a fine job of holding it up.
posted evening of April 28th, 2003: Respond
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I should note with regards to my earlier post dissing the Clifford books, that Sylvia thinks they are the bee's knees. She has memorized enough of the two we own ("Clifford's Show-and-Tell" and "Clifford's First Autumn") to be able to do a pretty good job of reading them out loud. A common scene at bedtime story time is, she will give me a book ("Green Eggs and Ham" is currently quite popular) and say "You read that", then take a Clifford book and say "I read that." And lo and behold, she reads! After a few pages she will get distracted and decide to trade books; we generally trade back and forth a few times before either of us gets to the end of our book, then it's time for bed.
posted afternoon of April 28th, 2003: Respond
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Saturday, April 26th, 2003
Ack... Well after I wrote the last post Ellen wanted to take a break; so I took Sylvia. She was crying! I took her for a drive thinking she might go to sleep but no way -- "I want to go home see Mommy!" After driving around for a while with no abatement I thought I would go to the video store and rent the "This is Spinal Tap" DVD which Mr Murtaugh recommends highly. Drove over there and when we parked and got out of the car, Sylvia actually calmed down! So I asked if she'd like to go to the library (next door) first, and she did; we went in there and she asked for a Clifford book, I asked the librarian where I could find such a thing and she pointed them out to me; we walked over there and while I was looking vacantly at the titles trying to see what she had been talking about, Sylvia pulled up a stool, climbed up, and pulled "Clifford's Birthday Party" off the shelf. (Clifford seems to me like a pretty good TV show and dreadful books, strange since it seems like the books predate the show, but still) -- I read her the book and then, the library closing, we headed over to the shop, which is called We Got Movies! As we walked in Sylvia said, "We got Rug Rats movie!" and walked over to the kids selection to look for it. Alas, no luck on the Spinal Tap, the owner said she would order it and let me know when they got it; but I figured I'd get a movie anyways. We have not yet used our DVD player; we needed a new VCR and found one for not much more money that has a DVD in it; so tonight is the inaugural use. I ended up renting "Hopscotch" with Walter Matthau which looked pretty interesting.
posted evening of April 26th, 2003: Respond
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