Griffin passed his written test yesterday and picked up his official learner’s permit this morning. Although we’re planning on doing a bunch of test drives at Grandma and Grandpa’s house over the next few days, he couldn’t resist driving the car up and down the driveway before we left.
Our first order of business was learning that the brake pedal is not the gas pedal. (Fortunately, for our garage door, this is why the car won’t start without your foot on the brake.)
Griffin attended the 2024 TCFC November Challenges
tournament with the Twin Cities Fencing Club. This was a small, local tournament, but it was Griffin’s best showing to date. He won four of seven bouts during the pools segment. Then he won two of three elimination rounds, earning second place overall in the tournament.
In each of the photos below, Griffin is on the right side of the strip. In the video, however, he’s on the left. (Mismatched socks may be his visual trademark.)
Griffin scores his first point in this video clip.
I’ve mentioned Griffin’s interest in musical composition in a previous post, but I haven’t shared many examples of his other creative outlet: art. He spends much of his free time creating pixel art and composing music for various video game projects. (Indeed, he has just confirmed his first paid commission!) Here’s a sampling of some things he has been working on recently.
And here are a few of his recent compositions:
To round out this trio of cabin posts, I took a few other random pictures of the sorts of things we did at the cabin this weekend: deflating and stowing the dock, touching up some trim paint, adding some non-stick strips to the wooden dock, role-playing games, other dice games, and a marvelous jigsaw puzzle (a gift from Grummy who passed along her love of puzzles to Andrew). We also prepped the well and pump for winter and put the snow shovels up on the covered porch lest they be irretrievable if anyone visits after the place is buried in snow. (We’ve learned that the hard way.)
Lest one think that we live an irredeemably charmed life, I should also mention that we did face a few challenges. For example, although the cool weather meant that there were few bugs outside, the black flies love to hibernate under the cabin roof. When the place warms up, they emerge in droves. Herds of droves. Hordes of herds of droves. We swatted and cursed at them, but our only moderately effective solution was to vacuum them up multiple times per day.
The kids got very excited to build a “tree-ish house.” They started by extending a small treehouse that the built last year. This was cool, but took up a lot of prime real estate and interfered with the view from the cabin. After some discussion, they chose a new plot in heretofore unexplored territory. (It’s only about 30 feet west of the prior spot, but it’s screened by trees.) They enlisted Sarah’s professional help, removed the old structure and built a new, improved one. The sounds of hammers and saws filled the woods today.
The first picture below shows them beginning to deconstruct the first draft house. The rest show the new one. (And Piper, of course!)
We made it up to the cabin for a long weekend. The weather is perfect: highs near 70 and lows just below 50. It’s dog heaven for Piper. The kids are engaged in a construction project. We saw the comet from the dock last night. A jigsaw puzzle is underway and we played a shockingly close game of Farkle. Not a bad way to recharge in the midst of a very busy autumn.
Note that while “GO MOM HQ” sounds like a worthy homage to Sarah, it actually stands for “Griffin, Oliver, Maggie, Olive, and Murray.” (Olive and Murray are two of the kids’ best friends who regularly come up to the cabin with us.)
It’s the first day of school at SPA. This is Griffin’s fourth year on campus, and his second year in the upper school. It’s Maggie’s first time, joining the seventh grade. (This is Andrew’s 15th year.)
Griffin has spent the last three weeks on a canoe trip managed by Camp Widjiwagan in northern Minnesota. This year his crew traveled up to the Quetico area in Canada.
Griffin went with his good friend Murray. We pick them up tomorrow but just received this group photo from camp. Looks like a great crew!
This weekend we joined our friends Ellie and Kelsey and two of their kids at Wild River State Park about an hour from Saint Paul. It was our first time tent camping in years and Piper’s first trip. She was amazingly well-behaved—nervous when we bumped into some horses on the trail, but she never barked.
Chef Griffin has outdone himself once more. The kids have a new cookbook based on a video game that they love: The Official Stardew Valley Cookbook. This isn’t the first recipe that they’ve tried, but it was certainly the most complex. Maggie, sadly, was out this afternoon, so Griffin was the primary cook with Oliver as sous chef. Served in pineapple bowls, this curry looked as spectacular as it tasted!
