Remembering Mom and tumbling rocks

Today, Marc and I, my brothers, their wives and kids, some of our other relatives, friends of hers from work, friends of hers from the League of Women Voters, our County Legislator and various other members of the community joined together at a local park for the dedication of a tree in her memory. It was planted right next to a ball field, so kids will be able to relax in its shade as it grows bigger over the years. I think Mom would have liked that.

Later, we had our relatives over to the house. A number of them hadn't seen it since we renovated it and moved in, so it was fun to see their reactions. They seemed quite impressed, and that made us feel good. I also showed off the Bose system. Knowing my sister-in-law, Caryn, liked Star Trek, I loaded in Star Trek II and cued it up to the first battle scene. My 14-year-old nephew, Ronnie, immediately seemed like this was way too geeky for him. Well, as the music grew, the phasers fired and things blew up, all of which you could hear with amazing clarity and feel in the floor, thanks to the Bose sub-woofer, he was quite impressed. As I shut it off, he said it was very cool. Everyone else was impressed, too, but it's not easy to get a teenager to admit it. :)

On the subject of rocks, today, after they had tumbled for a bit over a week with "coarse grit", I took them out, rinsed them and prepared them for the next step (a week of "fine grit"). So here's what they look like now...



If you want to see what they looked like when they were rinsed off but not yet tumbled, you can check out the prior post on this subject where I showed the group of stones from which we selected the ones currently being tumbled. They're not shiny yet--that's still a couple of steps away--but the details are coming out, as their outer layers are stripped away.