Friday

Good news about Ed's mother! She had the surgery yesterday for her broken hip (second time it's done that), and came through it okay. Since they started operating at 1:30 and we couldn't reach Ed's dad 'til after 10:00, we got pretty worried. Turned out though, that once they got the new hip in it turned out to be the wrong size. Ooops. Instead of taking it out and ordering a different one, they just tinkered about with the one they had until they got it to fit. Amazing. But she made it, and now she has a good hip (well, maybe), so she just needs to hurry up and recover and not contract any more nasty hospital infections while she's recovering, and then they can finally operate again and give the poor woman the colostomy bag that they should have given her when they removed her colon four years ago. Doctors. Your prayers and good wishes for my very long-suffering (literally) mother-in-law would be much appreciated.

I asked Katie what she thought of the idea of doing a nature study/journal sort of thing. She is so keen to start that she brought all this (above) stuff home from the park tonight. I'm stealing this idea from KathyJo, and I don't have the books yet (though I think I will buy the Nature Journal book, and KathyJo very kindly sent me a link to the Comstock book on Universal Library), but I did identify the flower as Railroad Flower. I think. According to my book on North Carolina wildflowers, it is a highly invasive vine which is found "in fields and waste places." Well, I still think it's pretty.

Travis's chemistry is back on track. A full understanding of electron clouds seems to be unnecessary to continue, and we happily figured the number of electrons in the orbits of different atoms today. (I just didn't want to leave a poor impression of this chemistry book, which I actually like very much.)