One last walk across the lake

Ended up going to the children's museum yesterday as it was too cold to go outside with the kids. They have all sorts of great things for the children to do including a mock factory where the there a load of foam blocks and conveyor belts with handles to turn so the blocks move around the factory, up and down chutes etc.. Dan spends most of the time we go there shouting orders down the voice tube that connects the different levels. Yesterday he sacked all of the other children for not working hard enough. He did take a break from dictating to go surfing however.

On the way back from the museum we stopped to buy some new tool boxes for Dan with his Christmas money so that he can do what I should have done years ago, namely sort out the huge box of lego that he has in his room. This is a classicly difficult exercise in taxonomy, what categories do we need, how much space do we need for the bricks, what about the bricks that don't fit well into other categories (lego maps for instance). It reminds me of one of my favourite taxonomy articles (I only know of one) which is how a taxonomer for the Chinese Emporer decided to classify the animals in China, the book is the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which it is written that animals are divided into:

1. those that belong to the Emperor,
2. embalmed ones,
3. those that are trained,
4. suckling pigs,
5. mermaids,
6. fabulous ones,
7. stray dogs,
8. those included in the present classification,
9. those that tremble as if they were mad,
10. innumerable ones,
11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
12. others,
13. those that have just broken a flower vase,
14. those that from a long way off look like flies.

While our system is nowhere near as brilliantly insane as this it is still tricky and so far we've spent about 3 hours and got a quarter of the way through the box. It is one of the those activities that is both unutterably dull yet strangely compelling.

A bit like Heroes in fact, the US superhero series which is pretty badly acted in part and not terribly well directed but keeps us up later than we should be. Worth a look if you don't mind a little gore and a lot of suspension of disbelief.

Today (sunday) it was a bit warmer, Andy was out at a sportswear party thing (so she can get leggings made for her that go below the knee) and allegedly it is going to be 11C next weekend so I thought I'd take the kids on a walk round the block near our house and across the lake while we still could.

Here's the kids on the lake outside our house with the house in the background (the brick and cream one)

Last snow angel of the year?Then we took a short cut home across Lake Cornelia (followed by a hot chocolate in our Max Brenner mugs -the best chocolate shop I've ever been too) and a snooze. Andy got home and then we had Irish stew from the freezer, which turned out to be chicken casserole - either ways a winner if you ask me.