8 July 2018

Gib finished his cello box this week.  He helped pad the inside of the box to protect his cello from scratches.  Gib plays a ¾ size cello right now.  He built his box for a full size cello so he has room to grow.

 Now his cello is standing in its box next to the piano.  The cello box holds his cello securely and makes practicing a little easier.

 We started our 4th of July at the parade. We love our small town parade.  Helen and Gibson shared the candy they caught with the littles sitting around us.

 The retirement center in our neighborhood invited all the neighbors to a barbecue.  Gibson made a slam dog-- a hot dog on a hamburger bun.

 Towards evening we headed to the soccer field for the firework show.  Our neighbor, Matt, continues to put on the best firework show we've seen.  Abe and Gibson helped unload the fireworks.

On the train between Odense and Vejle, Helen and Becky met a woman who loves lettering.  She told us about a style called bullet journaling.  Helen read about it online and liked the way it looks.  By coincidence, Becky bought a bullet journal in Paris, not realizing that was what she was buying.  It looks like a regular notebook, but the pages have dot grids instead of lines.  Bullet journalers like the grid because it almost looks like a blank page, but the dots help them line up their artwork and text.  This is Helen's first page of bullet journaling.

 Our friends, Rachel and Jaime, are hosting a Finnish exchange student named Sanni for a few weeks.  We invited them to dinner on Friday night.  Brandan got to speak Finnish for the first time since we moved to Southern Oregon.  Sanni shared her favorite Finnish rap music with us, which you can see playing on youtube behind her.  Jaime will go to Finland for a few weeks at the end of Sanni's visit.

 Abe cut out the legs and supports for his harmonograph on Saturday.

 Gibson took a fire building class through Parks and Rec on Saturday.  The class was taught by a 70 year old woman named Sue.  She covered fire making techniques that don't use matches.  This is a friction method.  Spinning the stick in a small hole creates very fine sawdust.  The friction of the stick creates heat which ignites the sawdust.  Sue had the class members put pine sap on their hands to give them a better grip on their sticks.

Here's a close up of the fire making tools.

 Using the hand drill created a tiny ember.  Gibson put the ember inside a tinder nest made of pine needles, cattail fluff and fire weed and blew on it until it caught fire.

 As soon as his tinder nest burst into flames, he dropped it into the fire pit.  The he used kindling to build a fire.

The next technique the class practiced was using a bow drill.  His right hand is holding a bow and sawing back and forth.  His left hand is holding an astragalus bone from a moose.  The bone, part of a moose's ankle, has a natural hole in it that allows the straight stick to rotate.  It was harder than the hand drill.  Bow drills were used by native people who lived in cold climates because the ember is formed on top of the wood.  In the other method, the sawdust would fall onto the snow and not build up enough heat to ignite.  The class was three hours long and spent over two of those hours learning friction techniques.  Sue could start a fire in less than a minute.  Everyone else took considerably more time, but everyone was successful in starting a fire with both methods.  For the rest of class, Sue quickly went through a variety of other techniques like flint and steel.  Gib's favorite was a ferrocerium rod which he could use to start a fire as quickly as a match.