Act 1: My injury is minor… not really even worth mentioning under normal circumstances. Given the circumstances I’ll mention it here with a little back-story. Shortly after we were married Chele decided that she wanted to learn to play the electric guitar. We bought her a relatively inexpensive model. For the most part it’s a pretty good guitar. The one downside is that one of the screws on the bridge has a burr on it. I’ve meant to file it down since the instrument was new but have never gotten around to it. I have my own burr free guitar but decided to play Chele’s guitar to band practice this weekend. At the end of practice I noticed that the burr had torn a small piece of skin off the side of my hand. There was a small amount of blood but it mostly healed overnight. I didn’t take a picture of it ‘cause it’s so insignificant.
Act 2: Sunday morning I’m getting Mojave dressed on the couch. I turn my back to help Anza who’s trying unsuccessfully to put her own shoes on. I was just getting to the second shoe on when… THUD…. WAAAAAA! Jave had fallen off the couch face first and landed on our somewhat abrasive wool rug. I picked him up to comfort him and he had his first bloody nose. But it wasn’t a real bloody nose that bleeds from the inside. It was bleeding from an abrasion on the side of his nose caused by the rug. The bleeding stopped soon after we washed it. It scabbed over and has noticeably healed over the last 24 hours. I took a couple dozen pics to get a good shot of his scab and this was the best one (ie my poor photography is not for lack of effort).
Act 3: A few days ago Anza got one of those punching balloons with a rubber band attached. She enjoyed playing with it for the first day. After that she seemed to be on a quest to find new ways to play with it. She discovered that she could hook the rubber band around a doorknob and hold the balloon to stretch the band really far… like 3 feet. All was going fine when the door was open and could move to line up with the direction she was pulling. The band staying securely hooked onto the knob. While Chele and I were cleaning up after dinner Anza decided to play her new stretch the rubber band game on a closet door that was latched shut. Things were going fine for a few minutes. We could hear the occasional sound of a squeaking balloon and a happy toddler. Then a piercing SNAP! Followed by a horrible scream of pain. Anyone who’s spent any time around Anza knows she has a very high pain tolerance. She has falls all the time that would send most kids her age crying to mom but she just gets up and keeps on going. I knew what had happened and feared the worst. Chele and I ran into the room to find Anza on the floor, screaming with her little hands over her eyes. I picked her up and held her for a few seconds but felt we needed to assess the severity of the injury to determine if a visit to the ER would be necessary. One at a time I peeled back her hands and opened her eyelids. I had a horrible feeling in my gut that I would find blood, but there was none. Chele and I sat holding her on the couch discussing how fortunate we (especially Anza) were that the band had missed her eye. Chele first noticed the welt. It was a puffy serpentine mark that meandered below her right eye. It got worse for an hour or so then started to go down. 12 hours later the mark is 99% gone and Anza seems to be able to see fine. 
I failed to get any pics of Mad or Taylor but did get this one of Eric playing ball with 
We’ve been before but saw many new things this time. I didn't get any pics of it but they had a cool mock up (complete with hammering and sawing sounds) of the original Boeing factory. Lots of old tyme power tools all driven by belts connected to an elaborate drivetrain of ceiling mounted rods, gears and pulleys. The wooden plane frames they had on display contained a lot of the same technology I'm familiar with from my experience on sailboats (spars and wires). I did get a picture of Anza's namesake (sort of) engine. I prefer to think that they just forgot the space between the second "A" and the "N". That the real name is ANZA NI.
My friend Wayne recently put some pics of the Long Beach, CA Airport on his flickr page. For those unfamiliar with it... many might say it needs to be updated, but I love it. It only has 2 gates, which are little more than a door that opens to the tarmac. They roll a staircase out to the plane. And bagage claim is just a cement pad next to the parking lot where they unload the bagage cart. The "Lindberg Line" plane would fit right in.
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