One of our iPad apps is the International Children’s Digital Library, which is a free collection of children’s books from all over the world that are written in an impressive variety of languages. One night at bedtime we were reading The Boat Ride from the app when one character said to another “You scrappy squirrel!” Everett thought this was hilarious and since then he has been calling people scrappy squirrels when he gets wound up. On a related subject we had a big storm late last Wednesday night that knocked a lot of branches out of the trees. Many of the small branches that came out of the oak tree in our neighbor’s yard had acorns on them, the first we have seen this year. Once Everett figured this out he collected them and put them in a pile on the patio to see who might come looking for them. This morning we setup Chris’ Canon Powershot camera running the Canon Hack Development Kit (CHDK), which provides a lot of capabilities that are not necessarily available when using the camera in its native state. We loaded a motion-detection script and pointed it at the pile of acorns while we were gone during the day.

It worked pretty well! Here are a few more shots.

In other animals news today: Everett had a lot of wiggles this morning so we went for a brief hike at Atwater Park.

One distinction about this park is that just offshore is the wreck of the Appomatox, which ran aground in 1905 and is clearly visible in the water (don’t worry – we couldn’t see it either):

Then we went to the Audubon Center for a picnic and the raptor show.

Today they were showing a red-tailed hawk named Skywalker and an owl named Tucker, neither of whom were labelled as scrappy but both of whom were very interesting.