Easter 2021

 

Sometimes it would be nice to have an Alice on hand, but we are a full house with the 4 girls and 4 boys

The Easter quest theme this year was BodaBorg and featured many physical challenges

A prerequisite was learning who the Borg are and why resistance is futile. We started watching one of the Star Trek TNG movies but we had to turn it off after a few scenes of involuntary cyborgification body horror.

Reward for defeating Borgave: British chocolate bars

Then Aunt Claire came through with a cross-cousin Underground Railroad themed quest

It required code cracking

Tundra enjoyed the reward

We signed up Tessie for tennis lessons at an indoor club

Heather's 1st dose of the Moderna vaccine left her feeling lousy

I got the Pfizer vaccine and felt a little under the weather but not too bad

I have never purchased a state lottery ticket of any type, not even a scratch ticket. Part of the BodaBorg quest involved samples of rare earth elements and the Rare World Metals Mint is your online source for erbium, tantalum, and for enough cheddar, platinum, rhodium, and even iridium. They offered scratch tickets with every order and my first scratch-off revealed a "W" for an ounce of tungsten, a $23 value! When I cashed that in, I got another ticket, but that one was only good for the booby prize, a slug of lowly copper. 

Late winter 2021

Aunt Katy and kids visited in late Feb for a dose of winter

We took a chance on a downhill skiing expedition. Since none of the adults would put on downhill skis, the older 4 kids were left to fend for themselves, having never taken lessons

The mountain, Berkshire East, had 4 lifts and lots of trails

Turns out they had a great time toodling around on the green slopes

Meanwhile Katy and I rented XC skis and toodled around the woods

Back at home we made Japanese candy

They all tasted very strange

The next weekend a cold snap froze the ponds again and we skated on the Arlington Res with the swans, ducks, and gulls. We even got in a game of 3-on-3 hockey.

Tessie's poem. Yes we have had a lot of winter rain

On the first nice day of Smarch we hung the new bat house. This one can comfortably house 40-50 bats and I'll let you know if it gets occupied

Pooled Covid testing was extended to elementary school kids and now Tessie gets to spit in a tube each Monday that she is in school. So far across the district since testing began in Feb they have caught a handful of cases, including one in the other half of Caroline's team. Because the teachers all had to quarantine, Caroline's in-school week was taught all by Zoom!

We scan the barcode before submission on Monday and results come out on Wednesday

Boda Borg reopened and we hopped over for a 4 hour session. We were in the zone and finished 16 quests in 3 hours. There were only 18 quests open and if you finish all of them in 4 hours, you earn the Questmaster title. The last 2 were ultra physical and we could get to the final rooms but were unable to complete them. Tessie and Erin had the upper body power to get us close, but we need one more lightweight monkey bar expert and maybe we could do it. 

Seems like we can only get XC ski times at night. We ventured off by moonlight over the frozen tracks.

Caroline's first downhill run (she's in the light blue jacket)

Heather's latest knitting device

Boda Borg we missed you