How to Make a Fruit-fly Trap

Take a glass and put some fruit-fly bait in the bottom.  A piece of tomato or banana works well.
Cover the top with saran wrap and poke some decent-sized small holes in the top [just realized my holes have been too big -- they should be tiny, made with a pencil tip or some such].  Use [...]

Free Boxwoods/ New England Mental Institution Look

We dug up the boxwood bushes in front of the house.  Waiting to see if we get any takers.  Sarah commented that the house no longer has that “New England mental institution, Brick n’ Boxwoods look.”

Drain Pipe Ditches

When we came home after over a month away we found a very damp basement.  No actual puddles or leaks but a kind of miasmic moldy atmosphere and, we discovered, some actual mold in some cabinets.
We went out and bought a new energy-efficient dehumidifier (we had one that looks like it dated from the 1980s).  [...]

Pin the Tail on the Cat

The girls and Sarah volunteered to make the Pin the Tail on the Cat for Keith’s 5th birthday party.  Or Pin the Tail on the Pot Luck as they referred to it.  I thought it was pretty great.
Btw, I finally bought myself a snapshot camera, so prepare for a new visual emphasis on Moonraking.  Sarah [...]

Fatherhood in extremis: Laura Ingalls Wilder & Cormac McCarthy

I finally read The Road — almost the whole thing in one sitting in bed and then finished it off the next day.  It’s pretty harrowing.  I’ve been haunted by that recent article in The New Yorker, “The Dystopians,” about ““back-to-the-land types,” “peak oilers,”… all-around Cassandras, or doomers,” and others who believe the U.S. and [...]

Engorged Tick Puppets & Pretend Blood Drinks

I love kids’ science.  Moonraking reader Amrak Ecilop tipped me off to the excellently gruesome activities offered this week at Ithaca, NY’s Sciencenter:
Winter Break Fun!

Monday-Friday,
Feb. 16-20, 2 p.m.
Visit the Sciencenter for a special daily hands-on activity every weekday at 2 p.m. during the winter break:
Monday:  Tick Puppets
Create a marionette puppet of an engorged tick.
Friday:  Blood [...]

Puppet Show: Mousie and Bunny — Fights and Friendship

Celie and Iris got a new puppet theater today as a belated birthday present.  They wrote and performed their first three-act play: Mousie and Bunny — Fights and Friendship.
Dramatis personae: Mousie and Bunny
Act I.
One day Mousie went to a puppet show and he met Bunny.
Bunny: I am the biggest bunny in the world!
Mousie: And I [...]

Girls’ birthday/ Airheads candy cake

Celie and Iris’s 5th birthday party today.  We felt like we were keeping it really small: just five kids invited, no parents or siblings for the most part (drop-off); no friends from school other than one neighbor friend.  (We sold the girls on the rationale that they had a separate party at school — we’d [...]

Weekend cooking: Oobleck Brownies

Oobleck brownies recipe:

1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
sprinkle cinnamon
dash salt
tablespoon of Ovaltine
green food coloring to taste.

Pour into baking pan and cook at 325 degrees for 20 minutes.  Allow to cool and cut as brownies.  Pretend to eat.  (It’s less revolting than anticipated.)  Eventually scrape off into trash.  You just took care of a good hour [...]

Fairy, Witch & their Familiars

The Holloween scene.
When Sarah asked Celie want she wanted to be, she said “a nice Witch.”  Then, to Sarah’s amazement, they actually had a Nice Witch costume at Target.  But then Celie changed her mind and started telling people she was a Bad Witch.  Sarah also augmented the costumes in various ways (like the moon [...]