I tend to avoid small talk in life. That's a plus or minus, depending upon who you ask. To me, it's a plus. To those who sit with me and twiddle their thumbs thinking of things to say, it's a minus. But tonight I feel like reviewing the weekend. I didn't get to talk to my folks this weekend, so this will catch them up.

Friday was the last day of this year's Shuttle Camp for the girls, which means there were rocket launches. The older girl has moved up to two-stage creations, but unfortunately the weather scrubbed the launches for her class. So, a trip to launch the newest rocket ourselves is on the manifest. Younger girl built a nice single-stage that flew well, and it looks great sitting on the shelf with the rockets of years passed. One of the instructors attempted the launch of a modified two-stage that was too light in the forward fuselage. It spun wildly as it left the rail, and I only had time for one thought: Uh-oh. Now the second stage is gonna… Which it did, flying straight toward some of us spectators, hitting the ground between myself and a dad who was just as slow as I was, and bursting into flames (the rocket, not the dad). Which just goes to show that in the world of rockets you can plan for certain types of failures, and with others it's simply over too quick to do anything about it.

A new activity this year for one of the classes was the challenge of using a raw egg as the cargo of a craft that was dropped from sixty feet above the concrete. It was kind of a Mars rover landing type of challenge, and my daughter's team used cotton batting, wings and balloons. Their egg survived intact, so score one for the home team.

We arrived home late Friday night and all three kids went to sleep easily, so the tired mom and dad stayed up to watch the movie The Bucket List. It's a good film; worth watching. The combination of camp, rockets, getting to see the girls again after their week of absence, the movie, and probably a bit of being tired all combined to leave me with a tear of weary joy in each eye as a lay down to go to sleep. "I had a good day," I whispered between myself and God. "Thank you for my life."

I'm steeped in a battle of wits with one of the puppies. A while back she figured out how to climb our rock wall and get into the neighbor's yard. Finally I resorted to running a dog-rated electric fence along the top of that wall, which did little to deter her. So I ran another line lower, back from the fence, which did the trick. But it only took her a couple of days to figure out that she can climb the metal gate on the other side of the house and get into the front yard, scale the wall into the front courtyard, and sleep on the front porch. So I ran the electric wire all the way around the fence in the back, and stretched it across the path to the metal gate. She came around to see what I was doing as I finished my work, stopped dead in her tracks, ducked her head, and backed off. War over, I figured. Until this past week, when I found her on the front porch and the wire by the gate torn down. So on Saturday I fortified the defenses with a bit more engineering, to find her tonight on the front porch again. She broke only a small portion of the wire, leaving the rest of the improved design functional with its secondary skirmish line, which she would have had to have engaged to scale the gate, intact. Yet she obviously defeated this perimeter. She would have felt the shock, I'm sure, and in fact there are claw marks up the side of the house (!!) where she climbed up by the corner of the gate. Hmph; War just beginning, I guess. She is one stubborn, determined foe, and I am now back to the drawing board. Perhaps something with cotton batting, wings and balloons...

Today was a party and ongoing sleepover for the two-stage rocket girl's birthday. Nine little girls in the house today and tonight. We'll see how the "sleep" part of sleepover pans out. It's almost midnight at the moment, and they just started a movie not long ago. I can tell I'm distracted; I posted Merton Monday before the clock rolled over. And with that, the weekend is officially over. Work tomorrow, and I don't want to go. But then again, I never do.

One more story to tell, but it stands well enough alone that I'll save it for a separate post. Besides, it's not a small talk story, so will get me back to my normal posting self. Have a good week, all.