Not My Bag

When I first moved in to the Royal Oak bungalow in 2001, my brother Mike gave me a housewarming gift that included a huge box of plastic food bags. Well, here it is nine years later and we just opened the last box!

I guess we'll have to buy our own plastic bags from now on...

Our Real Tree

You could call it a fake tree, but I assure you that the plastic and metal in this tree is just as real as the wood and needles are in an organic tree :) And we still love it!

Jewelry

Here is The Princess, wearing the Royal plastic jewels.

Keeping It All Straight

Although I cannot remember many of the basic tasks required to get me through my life, such as renewing my driver's license, I am required to keep an accurate mental inventory of exactly which members of each esoteric clan of LEGO Bionicles Zach owns.

Does he have Scrall, the Glatorian, or do the red accents belong to the Mistika named Toa Tahu? I truly believe that there are more Bionicles in existence than there are forms of life in the Amazon basin.

You can probably guess how good I am at this extreme mental challenge. I've already got one duplicate frying in its box on my car seat right now, waiting to be taken back to his legions of clan-mates at Wal-Mart.

The Girls

Another girl party arranged by Maddie...

Da Da Da Da Da Dora

Artificiality

For the first time in, well, for the first time ever we are not getting a real tree this year, and instead using an old artificial one. Just too much going on to go out and get one. We will dearly miss our annual Frasier Fur (our favorite), but not to worry, next year we'll get an extra big one.

Tale Of A Tail

My favorite part of Miss Brown's A.M. Kindergarten class was Show & Tell. Even better than that project where you cover a piece of paper with colored crayons and then black crayon and scratch out a colorful design. Absent-minded as I was, I could always remember to bring in my Show & Tell paraphernalia.

I remember sitting on the floor of the classroom in the sun. My little classmates all crowded around in anticipation of what wonders they would be shown. I could hardly wait for my turn.

There was no problem choosing what to bring in. I always brought the same thing: my plastic dinosaurs. Ok, once I brought my plastic astronaut. But all the other times, it was multi-colored sauropods and therapods, all the way.

I opened my paper bag and removed the first dinosaur. This was a grey Allosaurus, a favorite of mine. This one had been through many imaginary battles and sunk its teeth into just about all of my other dinosaurs, especially the pterosaur whose wing had melted on the light bulb, making it look injured.

I went through the small plastic creatures one by one, naming each and telling a little about how they lived. Miss Brown seemed impressed that I knew all of the long complicated names.

At last I came to the final dinosaur, a thin yellow biped.

"....and this is "Ornithomimus"

"Wow. How did you know that?!?!", Miss Brown asked

"It's written on his tail, right here..."

I guess it is typical of little boys (and little girls too) to love dinosaurs. Like the cosmos, they have always filled me with wonder. Even today, I have an actual chunk of petrified Allosaurus bone sitting on my desk at home. I look at it often and try to imagine it alive some 150 million years ago, top of the food chain, walking around the humid late Jurassic looking for stegosaurs to bite into.

I also wonder how they know it was from an Allosaurus.

Oh, I know...It was probably labeled on the tail.