Today was sunny, dry & hot: more like midsummer than mid-spring. The official high was 93 degrees, which seems unnatural for May.

Jennifer and I spent some time on yard work, removing dead tree limbs. (The trees in question have been in declining health for years. Each spring, we lop off a few more limbs. Soon there will be nothing left.)

Sawing off a one- or two-inch tree limb is the easy part. The hard part is chopping them into pieces small enough to fit in a yard-waste bag. That took most of the time, long enough that I began to wonder how much a wood-chipper might rent for.

Then again, I’ve seen Fargo. Wood-chippers make me nervous….

Jake was invited to a birthday party this afternoon – a pool party. When I went to pick him up, the birthday boy had just opened his presents, and they were getting started on the cake. (It was a white cake, with a thick layer of vanilla ice cream in the middle. Everybody got a slice, even me.)

Sam & Jennifer went to a Cub Scout thing. Sam got to build a rocket, out of a one-liter plastic bottle, with paper for the fins & nose cone and a lump of play-doh for ballast; to launch, add water, pressurize (with air from a bicycle-tire pump) and get out of the way.

Jennifer reports the rockets flew very well.

(This was Sam’s second year at the rocket launch, even though technically the event was for kids thinking of becoming Cub Scouts. Nobody seemed to mind that Sam – who’s been a Cub Scout for a while now – crashed the party.)

This evening, Jake & Sam did a FaceTime call with Grandma. The call itself went well, but getting Jake’s Apple ID set up proved something of a challenge. (It turns out eleven-year-olds aren’t allowed to have Apple IDs, so as far as Apple is concerned, Jake is twenty-one. Think of it as the Reality Distortion Field, still working even without Steve Jobs.)

And now (9:53pm), Jake & Sam are sleeping, the iPad is available, and Jennifer & I are watching television: some kind of award show for musicians, most of whom I’ve never heard of.