15 January 2017

Becky found this in a book she checked out from the library.  She thought it might be a hoax, but she turned it in just in case.  It was a real golden ticket and her prize was. . . a $2 gift certificate to the Friends of the Library bookstore.  Yup, two whole dollars.  It was more fun to just have the golden ticket and imagine what it might be worth (library fines erased, a free book, a trip to Hawaii).

 As Activity Day leaders, Becky and her partner, Ranae, have talked for the past couple of years about holding a pinewood derby race for our activity day girls.  It turns out our ward's pinewood derby track takes about 2 hours to set up and no one is interested in setting it up just for fun.  This year we finally figured it out.  We're going to hold our derby after the cub scouts finish on the same night.  Since the derby is at the end of the month, we're spending our meetings in January helping the girls build cars.  We had 8 girls over Wednesday night.  Five other girls met at another member's house.  Clockwise from the top are Ranae, Sarah, Annie, Georja and Ayla.

 We pulled out some of Abe's and Gibson's old cars for inspiration.  There are hundreds of photos of cars on the internet, but we didn't want the girls to be discouraged with images of perfect cars.

Once the girls decided on a design, Becky helped them cut their cars out.  

 Brandan helped them use a power sander to take the saw marks out.

Gibson got started on his car the same night.  We love trying new things.  The first night was a success.  Next week we'll paint the cars.

 On Friday we put Abe's portable ping pong net on our dining table and held a family ping pong tournament.  In this photo Brandan keeps score while Helen and Gib play.

 Here's Abe returning the ball.

 Here are the results of the tournament.  After Brandan won, we played around the world for a long time, which was great fun since all 5 of us could play at once.