5th Grade Wax Museum

 One of the big projects for fifth graders is the wax museum. They each get to pick a favorite person from the past and research that person. Then they get to dress up and recite a memorized speech about that person. 

Greta picked Lucile Ball and had a lot of fun portraying her. In years past they did this presentation inside of the gymnasium and invited the whole school and parents. But because of Covid they didn't allow parents to come see this year. I understand and was lucky enough to have a few teachers send me a video of Greta being Lucile Ball. The video has some background noise since it was done inside of a classroom with a few other students, but I think you can hear her. Good job Greta.....I mean Lucile!

 

Turning over a new LEAF

 Our daily driver, Sean's Taurus Police Interceptor, decided to bite the bullet. It went in for some recall work to the dealership and they informed us that the water pump went out. It's quite the job to replace the water pump in that particular engine and Sean was on the fence as to whether he even wanted to do the job himself. He started taking the engine apart and found that the turbos were also failing and would need to be replaced. He then started poking around the catalytic converters and discovered they were there but the honeycomb interiors had been removed and thus we were left with just the shell. It was strange but all of this explained the unburnt fuel smell that the car had been giving off. 

After a few weeks of working on it, Sean decided he wasn't up for the job and sold the car to a guy that was willing to put the work and money into it. We are happy to be out from under that project. It did leave us without our main kid hauler. We take our kids plus Jessica's two oldest kids to school each day and bring them home. We started using the Toyota Tundra as our daily driver and quickly realized it too big and too much of a gas guzzler for that job so we started our hunt for a new (used) car. 

We thought an electric car would be perfect for the 5 mile drive back and forth to school and the random trip to town each week. We spent several weeks car shopping and finally decided a Nissan LEAF would be just about perfect for our needs. One showed up several hours away so we hopped in the truck (with the three dogs) and drove up with the trailer to retrieve it last Saturday. 

 The dogs haven't all been in the car together for a long drive and were quite anxious. I'm pretty sure they thought they were going to the vet or groomer and never really calmed down until the drive home. Beanie, the littlest Boston Terrier, had horrendous gas the entire drive and then to top it all off she threw up. Poor girl is not a very good travel dog. It was a memorable experience though. 

 The LEAF we were going to see turned out to be a very well kept 2013 with 60K miles and still 11 out of 12 bars on the battery (the batteries degrade over time and the bars go down, this one still has 11 meaning it's been well maintained). At 80% charge it has a 65 mile range which will do about 90% of our driving needs. We have other cars that we will use for longer distance driving. 

We are excited to putter around town and not use any gasoline!

Endings and Beginnings

 We have a new member of the family. I haven't written about it because the reason behind why we got a new puppy is too difficult to write. We lost our sweet four year old Winston this past November. He somehow broke his back and was unable to use his front legs. He was found like that on the couch and to this day we don't know what happened. I think what happened was our very puppy like 30 pound Cooper jumped from the back of the couch down on top of Winston. They would play pretty rough. The vet said that particular break had a very poor prognosis. Even if we did find a vet school willing to try, there was a high chance it wouldn't work. We made the very difficult decision to put him to sleep. 

We were left with a giant hole in our family. The dogs were sad. The kids were sad. It was a sad time. Winston was the glue that brought Cooper and Bean together, without him they didn't know how to play. I made the decision to look for another Boston Terrier puppy to fill the void. 

We picked up eight week old Kevin the end of November and he's now nearly six months old. He's such a sweet little guy. He fits right in and plays well with both Cooper and Bean. We are keeping an eye on Cooper and making sure he's not too rough with the new little guy. Cooper just turned one year old and is just a big puppy himself. I never thought I'd be potty training puppies for a year. 

Welcome to the menagerie Kevin (can you tell we just watched Home Alone when we brought him home?).