A Winter thaw seems to have awakened the squirrels. They first started going after the crabapple tree which has fruit at the oddest times of the year.
Then they got closer to the house and started raiding the bird feeders, as squirrels will do.
Too rarely do we just go explore our land. Our curiosity subsided as we’ve gotten to know it. And I’m ashamed to report we’ve gotten used to our luck. It’s rare these days that we snap back to a mental state before any of this, which provides a point of reference for how lucky we are to live in the middle of all this. This has become normal and most posts on this blog are bound to become repeats with less of the enthusiasm of discovery. It doesn’t mean we enjoy it any less, it just means it has become normal. Today we tried to break this state of things a little, we went on an adventure, and it was awesome.
Some critter lives here
We went just over our land boundary to check the cemetery. I hadn’t seen it in 8 years, and it yielded plenty of conversations with Robin.
– Wait, are there dead bodies under us?
– Yes.
Plenty of graves there, some of people born in the 1700s. Lots of super sad small graves.
Established at a time when this wasn’t a forest, now being taken over by it. It’s a very peaceful place.
The Christmas Card video was meant as a bit of a gimmick, something to post about. And it definitely worked to this effect. PlottyBot had some visibility on Reddit and ended up on HackADay :).
It’s always fun to get a bit of spotlight and see people react positively to something you built. Then Robin needed to actually write a bunch of valentines cards to his classmates, and he didn’t want to do it at all. So I proposed the plotter and his captured handwriting to make it fun. He didn’t hesitate and I learned a couple of things. First, he was fully capable of operating it, a sign that he’s growing up and that the software stack does make plotting accessible. Second, it was actually less work to “mass produce” handwritten cards. I thought it’d be the same amount of work as compared to writing them yourself, but really he’d just show up to change the paper when the plotter was done. He was watching TV while the plotter was working for him… Maybe this whole project is a failure.
