For all our relative rest in January, February came in like a freight train. Throughout the end of January and right up to the day, Sean and the kids were working on cars for the Cub Scouts Pinewood Derby.

It all started with a build day at one of the pack meetings back in January. A bandsaw was brought in by one of the other parents so that everyone could cut their pine blocks into the profile they wanted. I was worried my anxiety might actually immobilize me if I saw that many kids age 11 and under around bandsaws, so I asked Sean to go with Ian to that meeting. He had talked through preferences with both the kids ahead of time. Ian decided that he didn’t care whether his car was fast, he just wanted it to look cool. Maya wanted hers to look like a cat … and to be fast.

To separate the ear ridge in Maya’s car, Sean drilled it out with a rotary tool. At the kids’ request, he bought white wheels to replace the black ones that came in the original car kit. Ian had selected a big metal skull to include in his design, but it took up half the weight allowance of the car (a paltry 5.04 oz), so they ultimately decided to save it for next year.

Pieces and parts showed up from all over. Sean visited the local Scout store, bought odds and ends from Amazon, ran to the craft store for the correct paint colors, and even made a trip or two to the hardware store.

Decorating started with a layer of spray paint for each kid’s car. Maya’s was the base color for her cat, Ian’s ultimately was entirely painted over. Maya painted hers to look like Lumos, our seal point siamese / tabby mix. Ian wanted his to look creepy, and big, veiny eyeballs were his theme. Eventually Maya’s was called the Furball Express and Ian’s was called ICU. Get it? It’s an eyeball pun.

The several days of painting weren’t even the half of it though. I had Sean explain to me all the little tweaks he made to improve the speed of the kids’ derby cars. He added tungsten weights to each car. Evidently the weight distribution is the biggest factor to gaining speed. He carefully drilled holes into each of the cars about 1/3 of the car’s length from the back. He used gorilla glue to secure the weights in the holes. After that swelled and dried to its ultimate size, he used wood filler to make up the difference. Then he sanded the whole apparatus smooth.

Removing friction was another big consideration. He bought some kinda tool to allow the axles to be bent at a precise angle so that the back wheels could ride on the outside edges of the wheels and the front ones could ride on the insides. Further, he used a saw to raise one side of the front axle channel slightly so that the left front wheel wouldn’t actually even touch the ground. This also allowed the car to do something called “rail riding,” whereby the car is pulled very slightly into the rail so that it doesn’t bounce around as much, which would otherwise be something of a momentum killer.

But wait, there’s more! He also de-burred and polished the axles. He achieved this by sticking the axle in a drill as if it were a drill bit, turning the drill on and taping down the on-switch, and then using moistened 1000-grit sandpaper to smooth the axle. And just in case things weren’t rolling smoothly enough after that, the axles were dusted in graphite powder to boot.

My gram scale, which is normally only used once in a while for precise measurements of seasonings for batches of sausage or yeast and salt for bread got a real workout during this whole process.

Check in for the derby cars happened the evening of February 2nd, with the big event happening the next day. It was clear that there was a tinge of unease when Maya and Ian had to surrender their cars for the night.

Sean got the majority of his advice from this video from Mark Rober, the engineer who rose to nerdy fame by creating a stinky glitter bomb to thwart a package thief. As I understand it, these are the easy hacks. A derby parent could go way, way beyond this. To quote a friend of mine, whose son was in cub scouts when he was younger, “Not saying I went over the top with pinewood racing, but I own a bandsaw, scroll saw, drill press, track, books and other assorted tools.” And later, “Note I am also not saying I didn’t go over the top. When I was buying syringes to properly apply wheel oil, I might have had a moment.” Heh.

The day of the race was pretty amazing. The scout leaders and volunteers were extremely well-organized and things went very smoothly. They made sure each car had a chance to run in each of the track slots and then averaged their time. This was done by den, then for the siblings, and later on, for the outlaws. Maya wound up taking second place in the siblings race! Competition was pretty fierce in the bear den though, and Ian, who admittedly had gone more for style than speed, didn’t fare quite as well (though he still had a really fast car).

There were tons of design awards also, and that’s where Ian was hoping to succeed. One of the categories was creepiest car, and he thought that was his niche. Sadly, an all-black car decorated with a tombstone was chosen instead. Then, to add insult to injury, Maya’s car was chosen for the best name award. She was understandably quite excited about her successes, but poor Ian had a rough day. She wasn’t even in scouts! Luckily, the blow was somewhat softened by him getting to go to a friend’s house for a sleepover later on that day.

Back in January, Maya had chosen band for her fine arts class next year in middle school. As part of that process, she attended an instrument test drive that afternoon after derby. She was given a sheet with all the instruments listed and blanks for each instrument’s proctor to assign a rating from 1 to 5, with 5 showing the most aptitude and 1 the least. We started with the flute, which was a little tricky, and she got maybe a 1 or 2 on that, but for everything else she tried, she had nothing but fours and fives, and mostly fives. She knew she didn’t want to do orchestra, so I think she tried everything but the string section.

Maya has perfect pitch. This essentially means she can hear a note and just tell you what it is without any reference note for comparison. She’s constantly dinging glassware and squeaking doors so she can tell you what note she’s hearing. It used to embarrass the heck out of me. Her former piano teacher would try and do solfege with her class of piano students – hand signs to go with do re mi. For what they were doing, the “do” was supposed to be a C, and evidently her teacher didn’t quite hit it, and Maya would loudly point out, “that’s not a C!” Sigh. Luckily her teacher rolled with it.

Anyhow, the folks letting her try out the instruments seemed pretty tickled with this ability, some of them testing her, some of them clearly trying to let her find notes on her own. She had so much fun. Our one hour visit wound up lasting for two solid hours. In the end it was down to oboe or clarinet, and Maya ultimately decided she enjoyed the feel of a double reed instrument over a single reed instrument, though she loved the way both of them sounded.

Immediately after this, we fetched a friend of Maya’s and they had a sleepover at our house. It was so busy that day. You know what else happened that day? My birthday. I don’t make too big of a fuss over things being on the actual date, so we actually went out for birthday dinner the night before. The four of us ate at Musashino. The sushi was excellent, to be sure, but possibly my favorite thing I ate that evening was a dish of salmon skin, fried and served with a pile of interesting veggies.

On the day of my birthday, after all the running around after kids, I baked a cake. I have gotten some amount of shit for baking my own birthday cake (Sean would like everyone to know that none of this shit came from him), but here’s the thing: I like to make them, and since it’s my fucking birthday, I don’t have to care about anyone’s preferences but my own. I made a strawberry cake with cream cheese icing, and I loved it!

The day after my birthday, I spent the afternoon taking Ian on a hike with his cub scout bear den, and then afterward we hung out at home and let me open gifts. This birthday is a weird one for me. I don’t generally get too wound up about my age, but I’m 48 this year, which happens to be the same age my mom was when she died. Her habits and lifestyle and circumstances were vastly different from my own, so it’s not that I’m worried. But it has me thinking about her more than I might normally allow. She missed so much. We’ve missed so much with her. I wonder how Maya and Ian would have reacted to her. She was a good human who didn’t always make the best choices, and in the baggage-free way kids love their grandparents, I expect they’d have loved her just the same.

Anyhow, it was a crazy, action-packed week! The kids had school photos on the 7th. And I thought I wasn’t going to get to post them for February, but luckily, we received them just a day or two ago.

Maya had a rough run in art class during second quarter. She loves making art, but when she decides she doesn’t want to do something, it can be hard to move that mountain. She even got dinged a little for behavior on her report card for it! What could be the cause for all this ire? Self portraits. She didn’t want to do one, at all. She explained it to me every time she had art class. So you can imagine my surprise when I received an email in February that said, “Your student’s self portrait has been selected to represent Davis Elementary in the Austin ISD District Art Show.” I was so shocked, I verified that it was Maya they were talking about and asked for a photo of this much-hated self portrait. Lots of wins for Maya this month!

As the kids are getting older, holidays seem to be a little less all-consuming. For Valentine’s Day this year, I baked the kid a heart-shaped pan of brownies and ordered them valentines from Amazon that they spent an afternoon filling out for their classrooms. They received cool hoodies from Lolli and Pop and Amazon gift cards from Grammy and Grandpa, both of which they were quite excited about.

Our weather has already been unseasonably warm. The daffodils came up sunny and bright mid-month. We have had multiple days well into the 80s already, with one day creeping dangerously close to 90. I could have cried. Please don’t let spring be over already!

I have a sous vide machine that was gifted to me by a friend who couldn’t return a water-damaged unit for refund. The machine (a SousVide Supreme Demi) worked great, and I made only one dish with it. We made that meal with some regularity though. I had planned to make said dish one week and was sad to discover that the machine refused to power on. We poked around at it a bit, tried to decide if it was worth trying to fix and ultimately decided to replace it with an immersion circulator. Somewhere in the past several years, these things have moved beyond professional kitchens and science labs to become a consumer item. The one thing I’ve tried so far – pork belly chashu to add to my packaged ramen – turned out beautifully. Now I make two dishes sous vide! (Maybe I should try more, now that I have the flexibility afforded by the circulator.)

We made onion dip from scratch so that it would be eat-able by a gluten intolerant friend, and it was DELICIOUS! If you don’t like to cook, it may not be worth spending time caramelizing onions, but if you don’t mind, then it is totally worth the effort. Just make sure you buy really sturdy potato chips – even the ridged ones we bought weren’t up to the task.

The rest of the month was ok, I guess. I discovered on unpacking Maya’s school bag that she had fidgeted a pencil entirely through her math workbook. One our friends asked if she disliked math. No, she actually loves math. I suspect she was just bored and may not even have been entirely aware that she was putting a pencil through her work.

Our internet was down for a couple days, which isn’t optimal for two technical people working from home. I discovered very quickly that my phone’s hot spot was not up to the task, not without a serious bandwidth upgrade. The kids’ screen time wasn’t super exciting without internet access either, so we all went out for palliative ice cream instead.

Toward the end of the month, we went with Ian to the Cub Scouts Blue and Gold Banquet. I was on more than one parent meeting where this banquet was discussed as though everyone knew what it was for. I had to look it up. It’s a celebration of the birthday of the founding of Boy Scouts of America. We went and had barbecue, watched Ian get awards for completing another bear adventure and for selling popcorn in the fall. We saw the fifth grade cubs cross over to being actual boy scouts instead. It was all very ceremonial.

In an odd turn, I’m actually writing this up on the last day of February! In the end, it’ll take a few more days to get photos and to post, but I’m sort of on time for a change. Who knew that was even possible!