Happy Thursday!

After math and Latin this morning, we drove up to Sparta. Travis's laptop died completely a couple weeks ago (it had been undergoing agonies for a while), and some very nice men from our church who refurbish laptops and give them away offered to trade him his old dead computer for a lovely, functioning computer. Definitely worth a trip up the mountain (and some first class thank you notes!)! Not only did Travis get a "new" computer, but one of the men spent a good hour helping him get his files off the defunct hard drive and onto my flash drive. Katie and I sat in the car and read (actually, Katie read Diane Duane's So You Want to Be a Wizard, which she says is wonderful, and I listened to Crime and Punishment. I've only got two hours left, and I have to say that the 2nd half of the book, unlike the first half, where the protagonist just wandered around murdering old women and sulking about it, is fantastic!), so everyone was happy.

And on the way home we stopped by Stone Mountain State Park for a picnic and some water fun.

 If you look very carefully to the right of Widow Falls, about half way up, you'll see Travis.

 Katie wouldn't climb up and slide down...

 but she caught a lot of snails!

 Be vewwwy quiet.... I'm hunting snails!

Here Travis is getting himself situated to slide.

And Katie lounges.

 Ed read the newspaper.

My little mermaid!

And this is apparently the time the rhododendron bloom!

And more sliding...

That wet mop of his completely obscures his vision, but he still doesn't want a haircut!

Even with the mop, he's awfully cute!

And then, of course, we had to have ice cream!

 Aren't they sweet?

 And there were such pretty flowers!

Does that look like a girl you could trust to hold your Moose Tracks cone for much longer?  I didn't think so either!

There... got my cone back!

And, finally...

wait...
This one is from Monday. or Tuesday. Anyway, Katie scooped some eggs out of the pool. We didn't know what they were, but they turned out to be frog eggs (I was afraid they would be mosquito eggs, and Katie would want to raise the hatchlings as pets.) The tadpoles swam around for a day but didn't survive beyond that, despite being admired and fed lettuce. Going by what we found on the internet, it was probably the pool chemicals that did them in. I guess frogs don't consider these things when they lay their eggs.

And really finally...

my happy boy with a working computer!