He got up at 7:40. Carly was in a video meeting with Jeff and Alex outside. I read some Ben Braver to him, then we played Minecraft. When we were done he didn’t watch any videos or ask for chocolate; instead, he did some math, finding problems that divided into repetends. I made oatmeal for breakfast. He had me being Ms. Safe and playing Minecraft. Myna was then inviting her on the server. Introvert was a word of the day. We then did a few more levels of Gravity Maze.
The weather was really nice and Carly then took him to the beach. I stayed home and did some work. The beach was moderately busy. They went to Poleg Beach, so a little wavier than they are used to for their creations. They went into Even Yehuda to the bakery to get a snack, as August said it was too sunny or something at the place at the beach. They took their things and went and ate in the library park and read, and also discussed paradoxes. He told her about the alien paradox (Fermi’s Paradox).
They got back at 1:40. He was doing alone time. He was playing piano then went outside on his own, closing the door behind him. That really hasn’t happened before. He saw the street lights go off and came and told us. They had seen the lights on when they got home and speculated that workers were checking the bulbs.
We played Minecraft, then watched a short video about “Null Island”, so null was a word of the day, then the “Perfect Squares Song”.
He did some Piano Maestro and played piano, then I suggested we watch the newest StressMonster Hermitcraft video. He then played with the Marble Maze and I was trying to do Piano Maestro. He wanted me to keep playing, saying, “I was hearing a lot of good ‘grrrs’ and ‘What’s going on?’” as I was trying to figure out the key that was re-broken. I started making the new piece and Carly went to school to scan some things. He did alone time, then we played Minecraft. We were working on the new house we were making in our survival world. Right near the end when we came back to the house a full side of it was oddly destroyed. Had to be some sort of glitch. August said, “And I swear I didn’t make a charger creeper…”
Carly made grilled sandwiches, and I finished the piano pieces. He had a graphing competition with Carly. When she made something cool he said, “I’ve seen you do bad ones so many times it’s basically like so impressive.”
We are our sandwiches. He didn’t like the bacon, saying it wasn’t crispy enough. I had told Carly to not make the bacon too crisp because he hadn’t liked it. He either has very specific bacon preferences, or just doesn’t really like bacon.
Carly talked to Cherie, and he asked her, “What a year like from your perspective?” After the call he was bothering Carly and not stopping. Carly went upstairs to be alone for a while, and he followed, saying, “I want to talk!” Which is good progress (although the initial bothering is not). And he came and talked to me downstairs. He went back upstairs to talk to her, but wasn’t (by his own admission, he said he asked her, “Are you done freaking out now?) exactly nice about it and Carly said she needed a few more minutes. He called me up and talked to me about it. Both times talking to me about it are big progress.
I then finished fixing all the keys. Well, sort of. For the low note (missing a screw and the little metal piece) I realized we had a bunch of small screws from all the taking apart that August has done. I found one that would work, then looked for a piece to replace the metal piece. Just a small rectangle with a circle in it. What I found was a circuit board from a hard drive. I broke off a corner of it that had a hole for a screw, sanded the edges, and made the hole a bit bigger with a drill bit. Voila. All the keys now play. Still plenty of idiosyncrasies, but we’ll call that character, and improve it even more as we go, especially when the new keycaps show up.
He watched the Kurzgesagt video about the Great Filter, then we did Brilliant, learning about the Goldilock’s zone. He played some piano, then we did some learning in the Number Bases class. We both went outside with Carly for the smell, and we discussed some coronavirus options. We then went back to number bases and learning how ASCII (a word of the day) works. At one point he then got up and ran to the Bits and Bytes poster and said, “So a terabyte is one billion letters of text!” He made the connection by himself.
We got him up for his bath, and then Carly read him the Comic Science: Solar System book. In the bedroom he asked me, “What’s ship’s log?” We listened to Circle Rounds “Song of the Horse”, where inseparable was a word of the day. Based on the story we ended up reading https://www.quora.com/Is-it-actually-possible-to-ride-a-horse-to-death and learning about how horses can be ridden to death due to the fear response.
He talked about wanting to learn a language again, and we looked at Duolingo and he chose Latin. We learned a little, like that Salve is hello. In Bedtime Explorers we listened to “Crocodile” and “Megalodon”. We listened to some Debussey piano music and he was asleep by 10:35.
First chord progression:
At the beach:
His piano pieces for this week:
Marble machine creation:
