Vince and His Tree

Tuesday I took Vince's mail to the Post Office and then went to the bookstore and wandered around for some time. I saw about 20 things I really wanted, but so good, me. I didn't buy anything. Not even the Sunday New York Times which was gone already, on Tuesday. Sulk.

Yesterday Rich and I went shopping for fireworks. We also stopped at PetsMart and got grooming stuff for the animals. Roni swears by the grooming gloves for the cats, but ours kind of yawn at them, and they cause static. But the grooming rake on Sailor, mighod. Rich ran it over his back once and the living room was filled with hair, so he sensibly took the dog and the rake outside. He managed to work out a small dog. I raked the dog later in the day and got another small dog's worth of hair out. We also got a brush for a double-coated dog, which is good, but we turn out to definitely need the rake.
We stopped at the grocery store and got Cristal D'Arques "2000" champagne flutes. The stem is the year. I know it's silly and schlocky, but hey, once every thousand years I'm allowed to be silly and schlocky.
Then we had lunch at Wood'ys. (I know. I hate that misplaced apostrophe. But the food is good.) I had the Samurai Chicken Salad. Excellent.

Today's project was to take Sam to "Millenium Magic" at the Golden State Museum. Sam is woefully uninformed about New Year's, about changing from 1999 to 2000, about millenia. I wouldn't really have tried to geek out about how this isn't really the millenium, but Sam wasn't in the least ready to see anything great about it at all. My kids at Sam's age would have been so excited they could hardly contain themselves.
Well, unprepared or not, we rode Light Rail to the museum. I got in for Senior price. (This is still exciting to me. There's gotta be SOMETHING good about being 55!) They hooked us up to audioguides, and off we went.
Well, we aren't ready for audioguides, either. Sam didn't really understand about punching in the new numbers, but kept hitting "100," the introductory speech. The child wasn't really interested in hearing all about the exhibits anyway. We more-or-less raced through the museum, which is really fascinating. Rich and I saw it this February on free museum day. We're going to have to come back some day, just the two of us, and spend the day. Sam and I finally got to the crafts, which is what the kid really wanted to do.

The child made a hat to celebrate New Year's. At one point Sam was holding small sharp-pointed scissors straight up near the face and I was having a heart attack and mentally reviewing my CASA rules for bloody accidents, but nothing untoward happened.
They had styrofoam cups and lids to make "time capsules" out of, which we did, but Sam really truly had no idea why. When the child was making a marshmallow and toothpick structure, it was flat. No 3-dimensional here, even though other children were making some and there were examples. I do not see "engineer" in this kid's future. The last thing was to make wishing stars and put them on the wall. I liked the star that read "To have a wonderful life and to have exciting adventures but I don't die." Good luck to you, oh 10-yr-old Rebecca! Sam's was "I wish I had a new cat" with a picture of this cat and other decorations. As I think about it later, I wonder if this wish had to do with what Sam is sure of spelling. "New", one of the words we had today, the child still confuses with "now" and wrote it that way on the star.

I had a lot of fun with my digital camera, by the way, but you guys don't get to see these pictures.

Sam is reading, and according to the foster-care provider, behaving much more age-appropriately. There's been a quantum improvement in the last few months.

My Y2K stuff has started, and I'm recording it. I was setting up, and discovered that if I programmed my VCR to go over midnight tomorrow, it started on December 31, 2000. So I'll have to record till 11:59 tomorrow night and have the next event start at midnight. I must check next year to see if this is an end-of-the-year bug or specific to Y2K.