They can't wait to hang out and be cool

One last little thing from visiting my in-law, brother, and niece: while we were driving up we got an unexpected phone call from my aunt, the rain goddess. She mentioned my sister-in-law had proclaimed to her, ``I thought you were my friend'', and was now not speaking to her. My aunt's advice: ``Ask about the Tweets.'' She wouldn't be less cryptic.

Shortly before Easter my aunt sent the nearly three-year-old a lovely seasonal toy, one of those animated kind-of doll things which dances around and plays a song on a button press. In this case it's a trio of chicks, with plush music instruments, who sing ``We Got The Tweets'', to the tune of the Go-Gos song anybody remembers, about the joy of having Easter treats. This is the sort of thing, like the stuffed ``Big Hopper'' bunny who sings a version of ``Chantilly Lace'' rewritten for Easter Bunny-ness which last year I sent skylerbunny and findra that grown-ups will play a couple times, amused, around the holiday, and then once more when they run across it house-cleaning in September, and forget about.

With a nearly-three-year-old, the appeal of pressing the button ... again ... and again ... and again ... and again ... and again ... and again ... and again ... and again ... and again ... and again ... well, this is the sort of thing that gets batteries thrown into the rain gutters. My aunt's done this before; she had her child nearly a decade later than her contemporaries, so she was the go-to person for gifts which were loud or contained many component parts, and when she did have a child she drew quite a bit of karmic payback.

I'm told, but don't remember it, that I did my part in getting back. Apparently one year I gave a very careful description of the toy spaceship I wanted for Christmas, and she went crazy in the attempt to find it, not realizing until after the holiday that she should have instead asked what toys which actually exist outside my imagination I wanted. While I do not remember this incident, I also do not doubt it happened.

Trivia: Powering the fuel pumps on the H-1 rocket engines which made up the Saturn I's first stage required two percent of the total propellant flow. Source: Development of the Space Shuttle 1972 - 1981, T A Heppenheimer.

Currently Reading: The Ghost Map: The Story Of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic --- And How It Changed Science, Cities, And The Modern World, Steven Johnson.