Today was pinewood derby day for Alex's Cub Scout pack. I've been furiously working on the timer for a few weeks now, and got it working just in time. Tuesday was also a scout day, and we were swimming at the high school pool, which was really really really cold. The kids don't care, but I was shivering as one of the few parents who got in the pool to keep an eye on them. I was told it feels warmer when you get moving, and I'm sure it does, but it's hard to move around too much when you're keeping track of a dozen kids who can't swim. Small group on Friday at the McCoy house was a really good discussion (men and women were separated because of the sensitivity of the topic) and we were there late again, and Saturday was an early deacons meeting followed by a few incredible frustrating hours of trying to get the pinewood derby timer working. One of the other dads was there helping out, but something was wrong and I could not get the thing to run. Plus, I needed a computer with a parallel port and a floppy drive, which my laptop has not, so I lugged the entire desktop out there to connect everything. And it just plain did not work, so after a while I just gave up and packed it all up, planning to just time things the old fashioned way. But I couldn't leave it alone, it bugged me too much. I spent the next couple hours at home working on it too, until I found the problem and fixed it. By then there was just enough time to get the babysitters for Beth's and my date night. We saw "Shutter Island," which I really liked, and had a moment of what the...? happen. When the warden drives up in a Jeep and says "there you are" to Leo, I recognized the voice and said to Beth 'That's the killer from Silence of the Lambs.' She says to me 'it's Leland Stottlemeyer.' (from Monk). Holy cow, SOTL is one of my favorite movies, and I watched Monk for 6 years, and never made that connection! I had to Wikipedia Ted Levine when we got home to make sure I wasn't crazy. Yes, Captain Stottlemeyer is Buffalo Bill. I never put that together. How could I not? No clue how not. Anyway, today was the derby, potluck dinner style. I got everything with the timer all set up and it worked perfectly (not that I don't have a few ideas for improvements for next year). Alex came in 2nd in his age group (there were 2 Tigers) so he got a trophy. Not even close to the leaders overall. But he was so excited. I also debuted the Car of Death I've been working on for quite a while, in which a remote controlled rat trap triggers a pair of spring loaded dowels with spikes in order to knock the other cars off the track. It worked, a little. It has a design flaw which tends to knock itself off the track, and the wheels also came off. But it did take another car with it, and it was a crowd pleaser. And my champion car from 1979 came in 3rd of 4 in the only race it was in. Overall a very successful derby.