Here’s some video from our previously-mentioned Water Rocket building adventures. Share and enjoy!

Things have been pretty busy around here with a dozen people living under our roof, so I haven’t gotten around to posting much lately. A few recent highlights in the family news department:

• Have been enjoying time with The Adams Family (snap, snap) immensely. I’ve tried to drag them around Texas in high speed tourist mode, but they’ve been content to relax and enjoy time of leisure and communion (as much as possible with 8 kiddos running around the house). It’s been great to have the time together.
• I took the three eldest kids to the beach this past weekend to camp on the sands of Port Aransas, where we met up with Meara, and to enjoy Sandfest 2006. We had a great time; there were some super sculptures, and the beach is always a treat for us — one of the places where we can stop being in a hurry and worrying about what needs doing and just play. Bliss! (You can see some of the photos on Flickr.)
• Jeff, my buddy Jason and I yesterday build a water rocket based on these plans. While we didn’t get it finished until 9:30pm or so, the project was a huge success — we estimated our best launches at about 150 feet into the air. Plus, as an added bonus, we didn’t get arrested! Between this, the trebuchet, and the cannon, I’ve got a pretty good arsenal going now.

  Check out Jason’s typically better and more thorough writeup here.

At Seth’s request, here’s a photo of the drum that Jeff & Karen brought from Africa for me. (Small child included for scale.)

Jeff and Karen Adams and their delightful brood of children arrived in Texas last night for two weeks of work and visiting. As Karen is Kathy’s sister, and Jeff an old college buddy of mine, we’ve been quite looking forward to their arrival for some time. The cousins were all hyper-excited to see each other, and after waking Liam by throwing pillows at his head, spent an hour running around the house shrieking their glee for all the world (or at least our neighbors) to hear until 11:00pm, when we finally decided it was time to duct tape them all to various beds around the house.

I was thrilled when Jeff hauled in a gigantic african drum by way of a present; it’s a beautiful piece of work, carved from the trunk of a tree with a hairy goatskin drum head. (I’m a little baffled as to how they navigated transoceanic flights with such a beast in tow, but am grateful for their tenacity.) I’ll need to enlist the aid of some of my percussionist friends to teach me how to make the most of it!

We’re very excited about the chance to spend the next couple of weeks with this too-infrequently seen portion of our extended family!

I’ve added a couple new items to the “Do Some Good” sidebar:

• The Fight Aids link goes to the World Community Grid, a distributed computing effort that allows you to donate your unused computer time to a couple of giant research projects, among them an effort to find more effective protease inhibitors to deal with HIV. (Windows and Linux only so far, unfortunately.) Best of all, it doesn’t cost you a dime.
• Help Bill Help Nehemiah Project goes to the fundraising page of Bill Cunliffe. Bill is my sister-in-law’s brother who lives in London and is running in the London Marathon on April 23 to benefit the Nehemiah project, an organization that helps people with a variety of addictions and other issues to overcome them by living in close-knit community. Great work. Bill needs a few hundred pounds more to reach his fundraising goal, so go chip in! (You can use a US credit card — the bank will do the currency conversion for you automatically.)
• Give a Cow links to Mercy Corps’ “Cow Kit”, which allows you to fund the gift of a cow for an economically marginal agrarian family. It’s truly the gift that keeps on giving.
• UPDATE: Seth is riding in the PMC again this year, so go Help Seth Fight Cancer!

• Back when Abigail was still of the appropriate age to sit in a high chair, we had stopped at El Chico on the way from Denton to San Antonio. As a red-blooded Mexican food loving Texan, I was delighted when I looked over to see Abigail diligently dipping her chips in salsa before wolfing them down. She still falls down as often as she manages to walk, but by golly, she knows what to do with a tortilla chip!

  My pride swelled to epic proportions a few minutes later when I looked over and found that she had abandoned the tortilla chips altogether and had upended the salsa tub, sucked it dry, and was now licking the last dregs from the bowl. That’s my girl!

• Once, while working at Motorola, I was standing next to a guy at the row of urinals when he glanced over and said thoughtfully “that’s a pretty short one you’ve got there.” It took me 5 seconds of flummoxed silence to realize that he was referring to the fact that I was using the urinal that was at the appropriate height for kids, and not insulting my manhood.

After Kathy left for her sinus surgery this morning, the kids and I left for the University with a pile of orange paper in hand. We found the highest places we could get to and made and launched paper airplanes and helicopters for about 90 minutes.

Upon our return, we got a call from the ENT who was responsible for the surgery. He said everything went fine, and we should expect to hear from the surgery center in about two hours when Kathy comes out of the anaesthesia and is ready for picking up.

So, apparently all went well. Thanks for your prayers and pies! I’ll post again once Kathy is home and settled in.

Kathy’s home and sleeping fairly comfortably now. We’ve got some antibiotics and pain meds for her, and the surgery center staff warned me that any documents she signs in the next 24 hours aren’t legally binding — another nefarious scheme foiled!

Thanks to Mary, Chris, John, Lori, Ginger, Debbie, Pam, and all the other folks who have been helping with food, juvenile herding, etc.

I’m overdue to do an update, but since this is officially Spring Break — though the University doesn’t see fit to actually give us any off time, instead asking us politely “won’t you please take some vacation time so that we can turn the lights off and save some electricity?” — I’m not at my most motivated. So, it’s bullet point update time!

• Liam managed, a few weekends ago, to knock out two teeth within about a 45 minute span. Fortunately, these were teeth that were overdue to come out anyway, but I still thought it funny and appropriate to his character that he managed to accidentally bash out each independently of the other in such a short span.
• I enjoyed a very nice birthday party this past weekend with a good deal of the extended family. (March 10 marked the end of my 36th year.) We went to Landa Park, cooked and ate a great deal, attempted to hijack one of the flatcars from the park’s miniature railway, and played Horse Balls, a great game originated by one of my coworkers. Thanks to all who attended!
• I played at my church on Sunday, and Grant’s church on Wednesday. Both went enjoyably for us musicians, and hopefully for the congregants as well. I am amused to discover than I’m having a sort of anti-puberty as time goes on, and my vocal range continues to gradually climb back up from where it fell in my teens.
• Kathy goes in tomorrow for sinus surgery, in hopes that straightening out her septum and clearing out her sinus cavities will help prevent the recurrent sinus infections to which she’s prone. If you’re of a praying mind, keep her in your prayers. If not, send us a pie. It won’t help the sinus issues, obviously, but we really like pie.
• I had some good visits this weekend with folks I don’t often get to see. Jonathan and his honeypiesugarbearsnookums Christine stopped in on Monday night for a visit, some looking at photos, and a trip to Valentino’s for the best pizza in the free world. Greg came through town and stayed with us last night. We played a bit of music together, enjoyed a few beers, and dropped by Cheatham Street Warehouse to listen to the participants in songwriter night. I enjoyed both visits a great deal, and Liam was thrilled to get to camp out on the couch for the night.

Fellow Stupid Guy Daniel has his chapbook Dead Man available for preorders. (A chapbook is “a short book of not much more than 20-25 pages, generally poetry, printed in short runs,” according to Daniel.)

While I generally have little patience for poetry, especially the maudlin self-indulgent sort of pap I write, Daniel’s stuff is lucid, meaty, and quite rewarding. You can preorder his tome at Rather Small Press for the bargain price of $6.50 Canadian (which is about $0.23 USD).

Also, while I’m on the subject of Daniel, be sure to enjoy Saint Daniel of the Ferris Wheel.