Abstract Art

Before talking about anything else, allow me to share with you a piece of artwork from the Madison collection, a bit of abstract art she's been assigned to do recently.

She is not a fan of abstract art. At all.  Nevertheless, this was her assignment, and she did the best she could with it.  She's described this as a gloomy sea meeting the darkened shoreline on a melancholy day.  Which all sounds rather depressing when you look at it that way.  Perhaps the recent gloomy and melancholy weather has her inspired to paint this way.  Or perhaps it's just that she doesn't like to paint abstract paintings.  But about that weather, take a look at this chart here:

This chart here shows how much rain we've had in this area the first two months of 2020.  Despite all this, the weather is still too warm for it to freeze.  But all that aside, look at the numbers here.  February had a stunning amount of rain.  There hasn't been a month in all these years that is even close.  And here we are in March, and it's still raining!  Here's a stat I just heard:  we've already gotten half a year's worth of rain.  So, half the average amount of rain we get in a year... we've gotten in less than three months.  And that's without any hurricanes.  Crazy, huh?

Like I said, sadly, the temperature is too warm for it to freeze and become snow.

Tonight was KidPak, although Madison stayed home to take a bath and study math.  Yes, those two rhyme.  Anyway, she has a unit test tomorrow.  The teacher offered her an option to take it later, given the funeral and so forth.  But Madison chose to go ahead and get it over with.  She has time to study tonight, and she's not that worried about the contents of the test.  It's probability and statistics (sort of like the statistics you see above!).  She feels pretty confident about the material.

Daddy got home afterwards, and got hit by a yeti.  That's the latest thing.  We were at the Big Foot Museum last summer, and Madison got this little ball of fuzz shaped like a yeti.  It's a plush yeti.  She likes to throw it at Daddy when he's least expecting it.  Like, tonight Daddy was under the bridge in our house, beneath the passageway to Madison's room.  And I was just standing there, knowing she was above, lurking, waiting to hit me with it from above.  And whap!  I got hit anyway.  She saw my shadow and knew where I was, and the rest is history.   I got nailed by a flying yeti.

Anyway, we had our usual bit of work tonight, where Daddy was reading to the kids about Ziklag.  And we had a good night there.  Tonight we started reading the next Thrawn book, and there's a lot of tension between Darth Vader and Admiral Thrawn.  The book is about Thrawn, so it's easier to cheer for him.  He's certainly a lot more intelligent.

We still do all the routines each night, even when Daddy is working late.  There is hide-and-seek, and there are zerberts.  There's the precise arrangements of specific blankets each night too - she's very particular how things are set up on the bed before going under those covers.  We read from the devotional, and we read from our novel, whatever that may be.  Then we pray.  Zerberts follow, as do the insults: "Good night, Grand Admiral Stench!"

One last thing:  we had an amusing memory come up today, one about Billy Barty of all things.  He was an actor of smaller stature back many years ago.  Here's the memory:  apparently, my great uncle had a rival roller skating rink to the one owned by Billy Barty.  All this time, I thought it was another dwarf actor, Hervé Villechaize, because I think my grandfather must have gotten them mixed up.  So all this time, I thought it was Hervé that was the actor my great uncle didn't have a great opinion of.  ANYWAY, after looking it up today, I discovered it was Billy Barty that owned the rival roller skating rink, and not Hervé Villechaize.  So that's how I'll close today:  My family’s claim to fame (on my dad’s mom’s side) is a great-uncle who had a rivalry with a dwarf actor who owned a competing roller skating rink.  Hollywood needs to look just down the road if it needs new ideas.