Everett recently learned about static electricity. Or, as he calls it, ecstatic electricity. As in:

• “Ecstatic electricity!”, after one of us goes down the plastic slide at the playground and then shocks the other family members.
• “My hair is ecstatic-y.”

It’s surprising that Chris has never heard of ecstatic electricity before, especially considering his education in electrical engineering, and that he has spent a significant portion of his life around engineers who have an unbelievably nerdy sense of humor.

Strangely enough, static electricity came up recently in one of Everett’s books, Amazing Cows, which has a story about Violet the cow, Morton the pig, Baxter the very loud chicken and Wendell the very confusing duck. At one point Wendell is singing a slow, sad song about static electricity that goes like this:

You used to cling to me,

Give a zing to me,

Tell me, my laundry,

What went wrong?

Oh, the static electricity’s gone…

Lastly, here are a couple things that make Everett, if not ecstatic, happy at the very least: licking the cookie dough off the KitchenAid mixer and tromping through mud puddles.

This video was taken on Sunday afternoon during a trip that Everett and Chris took to Lakefront State Park. The park is mostly an artificial island in Lake Michigan that is a haven for birds and people looking for a nice walk with a great view of downtown. Interestingly, in the span of about an hour there we collected several small crab claws. We have never seen crabs there and thought they might have been left by humans, but these are too small for people to eat and they were scattered across a large area, suggesting that they were left by birds or some other animal. Also interesting was the fact that we never saw any other crab body parts, just the claws.