Dash

The first weekend in December Kennet competed in a sea kayak dash up at Deception Pass. It had been snowing in Seattle the day before and it was extremely cold up there, with intermittent snow. I took many failed photos but I like this one of him coming back in, a little over an hour later with a very respectable time. I warmed up by hiking up and around to the other side a huge hill where the main part of the pass is to get a better look, but I didn't take the camera for that part. Man is it hard to tell a bunch of boat people apart at height.

Christmas business

Here is me with my comb-over and our cute Christmas tree. We got a Norfolk Pine at City People's a week or two ago with the idea that it's the best compromise we can come up with . While I love love love a real tree, we both agree that cutting it down is a little more than we want to bite off at this point.

We made our own stockings this year, using somewhat felted sweaters. Kennet cut out the template shapes and I made some embellishments and sewed up the edges. We'll post more photos as soon as they're completely done.

Among the other Christmas business taking place around here:

• a gingerbread castle, complete with gummy bear minions
• highly technical present wrapping of all kinds
• christmas birds that now adorn our door, our tree, our wall, and every christmas card or present I'll give this year
• many other secret things I can't describe yet
  

3 more days of work and then a lovely 6 day weekend.

Photo Dump 1

This should be the first of a short series of photo dumps. Not much in the way of text, just pictures. Most of the pictures speak for themselves, or at least have little to say.

Genius

Earl Hallows Eve

Tis the Season for Cooking

Something about the cold weather is making me want to hoard baking ingredients and make things that include squash. I'll have recipes soon, but here are photos of the new stuffI tried out this weekend. Above is coconut encrusted tofu and the soup below is topped with sweet potato dumplings. It was awesome.

Treats

These are quite possibly the best homemade pumpkin muffins ever. I found the recipe here and added walnuts to it. They are extremely yummy and at least a little healthy. A lot of the oil was replaced with applesauce (I love that trick) and I put in less sugar than it calls for. I made a few today for a grad's birthday on Tuesday. The box, with cute wrapping tissue paper and ribbon is from a Martha Stewart kit on clearance at Michaels. I am loving the MS craft materials line, though I do think some of it goes a little to far in doing the work for you. But these treat boxes (and bags) are so cute.



Those blue blocks above are the quilt I'm working on for our bed. The one below is the vintage top I finally finished off. Today I put the binding on- scalloped in the same round shape you can see below, so a bit tricky. It won't look perfect, but it's on and in the end I'm glad I retained the scalloped edges. It has some great fabrics in it.

The Earls

For Kennet's birthday I commissioned Hillary to create some Earl related art. He is now well on his way to becoming a deity (Earl, not Kennet) and this is just the first step. The frames are in the mail, I can't wait to hang them!

Liza turns 8

I still haven't decided if these are scary or cute. Kennet spent about 3 hours helping me scan and photoshop and print and etc. etc. Hillary drew a body and I made some paper clothes for them, which we scanned in too. I think they turned out rather well. They come with totes/sleeping bags and a larger tote bag to carry them around in. I stole the idea from one of my favorite blogs. I don't know how she got her colors so vivid, but I think these are cute if you don't stare too hard at them.

I think it's kind of funny the way the stuffing bulges and makes us look slightly swollen.
We look waterlogged.

And finally

Instead of journaling about our adventures in Africa, Kennet, David and I created mind maps about each place we went. There is a map for more or less each location we went to and it includes all the things that we thought were memorable enough (or possible to draw with our second grade abilities). It made it easy to keep track of the immensity of the wildebeest migration, the bizarre bird noises, and the piles of food we ate, without having to write everything word for word. Plus, they're cute.

David scanned them before we left and they're all here.

The Missing Link

David's camera was stolen shortly after we seperated in Tanzania. Luckily, he had sent a CD of his Meru pictures home with Erica and I just figured out that they're on his blog. Here is the link if you haven't seen enough already.

I think you can go from that page back to David's gallery and see other folders of Africa pics from his year there so far.

E-cards

Since today is David's birthday, I sent him one of these e-cards that my friend Melissa introduced me to. His response has inspired me to start sending them instead of emails from now on. Not really, but still, they're hilarious.

Green Stuff

I found this blog referenced on one of the craft sites I regularly read. It's called Tiny Choices and it's maybe obviously about making small steps toward being green. It looks very cool, though I'm basing that almost entirely on the fact that they have a link to this site, which lets you put in your address and calculates the walkability of your neighborhood. Yet more fodder for me to stay in Seattle and not move to BI. My neighbhood got a 97, work's neighborhood got an 18. Very sad.

I always knew you were a winner

Picture of the Day winner

[Edit by Kennet]
They have to come up with a winner every single day. Some days they scrape the bottom of the barrel.

19 timezones

And. . . we're back!

We'll have loads and loads of commentary and clever things to write coming soon. For now you can peruse a couple of our Picasa albums. Kennet divided them up into three categories:

• Best of
• B-sides
• Snapshots

More soon. . .

It seems that anyone with an opinion can be an expert

(Warning, this post is all text and no pictures).

I guess I'll voice my opinion, and see if anyone ever calls me an expert.

Here's a Seattle Times article, just one of a steady stream on the Seattle housing market, and the national market at large.

The bullet points are:

• Number of homes sold went down
• Number of homes on the market went up
• Median price went up

They cite an analyst, Glenn Crellin, who claims that the shift toward a buyer's market caused people to buy more house, hence the increase in home price.

To me, this explanation is a load of hooey.

1. It carries the testable prediction that the average size, or quality of homes went up. They don't report if that's true. It seems like a key piece of evidence that would be screamed from the rooftops if it were true.
2. The claim just doesn't make sense. It might make sense if home size/quality went up at a flat median price. Instead, they're claiming that many home buyer's have the train of thought: "Wow, homes are cheaper than I anticipated! They're so cheap I think I'll blow my budget on one." ...
   
   huh?

I'll propose an alternate theory. I have no idea if it's true but it makes a bit of sense. In the interest of full disclosure I'll freely admit that this theory fits with what I want to believe.

The housing market is not entirely composed of rational and informed individuals. I don't know the percentages, but a significant number of players in the housing market are poorly informed, misinformed, or just plain irrational. If you want examples, look at all the human-interest stories about sub-prime loans. They invariably feature idiots who make $35k a year with 4 kids, "buying" a $300k house.

The three bullet points above can be explained by the actions of two separate groups of rational and irrational players in the market.

• Rational home owners see that the market is going to go negative sometime soon. Those with the right circumstances are trying to sell their homes now. In a market, you haven't actually made money until you cash-out. They're trying to cash out, hence the glut of homes on the market.
• Rational home buyers aren't buying right now.
• Uninformed or irrational buyers are still buying. This group intersects with people who either buy too much house and/or pay too much for what they buy.

In short, the average sale price went up not because prices went up, but because bargain hunters aren't buying.

Buried inside this argument is an important statistical truth that is often lost on people. Comparing means requires comparing similar groups. If groups aren't matched, a difference in means may reflect a difference in sampling bias. If you eliminate bargain hunters from the market, the average sale price will "go up," but only because you've changed your sample group, not because values actually went up.

Keeping things scientific, here are a couple of testable predictions (that I won't bother to test):

• Home purchases by successful real-estate speculators have gone down.
• Demographics of home buyers have shifted (which really is a broader version of the first prediction).
  

Return of the vegetarians

Well, we seem to have a MAJOR aphid infestation in our sprightly little garden. There are at least 3 kinds of aphids, first they took over the older leaves of the parsley, then the oregano, finally the peas and the lettuce. So I did my first real harvest and we'll have one tiny salad total for dinner tonight. The peas are just flowering, but the lower leaves are all dying, presumably because of the bugs. Same with the sage. Hopefully the onions will still be good in a week or two and we'll be able to eat those.

But it was a good experiment. Rachel says I might just start over, but since I'll be gone for almost six weeks, it doesn't seem totally worthwhile. Won't they just come back??

The countdown begins

Did you know we are spending a month in East Africa this summer? Yikes, me neither. We leave three weeks from the day after tomorrow (three weeks!) and yikes. Still a lot of work to do, both work work and life work, to get ready for being gone for that long and for the logistics of multiple countries. Last Friday I had 4 needles stuck in my arm and 4 bottles of pills sent home with me. This is just the beginning! Check out this google map I made of our trip. You may have to use the hand tool to scroll down a bit to see the whole thing (just like in a pdf), I can't get it to center. It's basic, but we'll be doing some good postings hopefully while we're gone and definitely when we get back.

Above is Mt. Meru in Tanzania, where we will be trekking. For more reading, go here. Below is the topo.

Spring Projects

I made these lemon custard cakes a few days ago- very light and lemony and super easy. The recipe came from this great cookbook my sister sent me for my birthday- I didn't even know it existed though I've been getting the magazine religiously for a couple years now. Beautiful photographs which I like because then I know what it's supposed to look like.

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In other news, I've been busy with small birthday and mother's day gifts. After ordering and returning a small coin purse from an unnamed company, I got a little obsessed with trying to create them myself. The zipper on the one I returned was put in with very little thought, did not line up at the end and didn't even close all the way. So thanks to the Denyse Schmidt book, I've made about 6 of these. I also saw these tape measure purses in Ballard- blatantly stole the design. . .








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In garden news: take a look at how things are growing! We have a bit of an aphid problem, but they don't seem to actually be killing anything. Scott told me (in so many words) that I probably traumatized the plants a little in their migration across from the island. But they still look edible don't they? I love those peas- probably my favorite. Those are the today's photos on top and the lettuce about a month ago.

A rebuttal

Well, now I feel compelled to point out the other side of Bike to Work day, if nothing else than to separate myself from my co-blogger's well-intentioned, but incomplete theories. On one hand he has a point, but I think he neglects a very important aspect that I witnessed many times this week. Biking to work in the scheme of the whole world can be very scary for some people; it's just too big a scale in their minds. Having May 18= Bike to Work Day gives people something to shoot for, puts in on their radar, and makes it less scary. Having one day designated specially gets the word out and gives people an opportunity to put their butt on the line by trying something new, in a semi-supportive environment. While it may not sway the non-believers, it will give those of us who are a little more timid that push we need.

Also, I heard complaining today from other regular cyclists. Yes, it can be slightly annoying to have more people on the road, riding slowly and taking up space. I think, though, that this has more to do with the fact that our transportation infrastructure isn't built for it. Don't blame the riders.

So there.

Springtime: when a young man's fancy turns to robots

After my last two posts, which consisted entirely of words, a certain unnamed co-contributor to this blog informed me that I am to be seen and not heard. In that spirit, I'll go back to my usual role of providing pretty pictures. However, in my own form of civil disobedience I'm going to show only the most saccharine, nauseatingly cute pictures this post. Take that.

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First on the block is a young robot, Gordian "Gordie" Knot. He looks sinister but don't let that fool you, he has a heart of gold (That's not strictly true. His heart is actually a muon-catalyzed cold-fusion reactor, but his emotion simulation unit has gold plated leads).


Gordie and Earl are basically inseparable now, as evidenced by this soft-focus, vomit-inducingly cuddly bit of portraiture.


Ok, I have to stop posting photos of Gordie and Earl now. It's as bad as, possibly worse than, girls who blog about their cats.

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My big development in the last couple of months is my shiny (actually matte) new Pentax K10D. After a hiatus, I'm getting back into the world of SLRs. This isn't a total switch from my trusty FZ-50. The FZ-50 is still my camera of choice for kayaking photography, given its small size and the versatility of its lens. However, the Pentax provides absolutely wonderful picture quality if you're willing to do the legwork. Unfortunately, I haven't had a whole lot of subject matter recently, but here's a good example of what the K10d can do with a 43mm F1.9 prime.

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Finally, I'd like to end this incoherent rambling with yet more incoherent rambling. Today was "Bike to Work Day." This meant that on my morning ride I probably saw about 5x as many people as normal on the trails and streets. This is good. However, I'd like to ask the question, "Where are these people every other day of the year?" I suspect it boils down to one of two possibilities:

1. All of these people normally bike to work with some regularity. They just made a concerted effort to bike to work today, creating the illusion that many more people than usual are biking to work.


2. "Bike to Work Day" creates a false dichotomy in peoples' minds. May 18th = Bike to Work Day. Every day that's not May 18th = Drive to Work Day (I bet I can think of some corporate sponsors for that).

My general cynicism tells me that the latter is more likely the case. Biking to work one day a year is good. Biking to work more than one day a year is better.

Tokyo International Quilt Festival

I stumbled across someone else's flickr set of photos from the Tokyo International Quilt Festival a few days ago. There are some absolutely amazing quilts that I would never have thought of there. Check out this one above called “Sky Diving” by Tomoyo Hosokawa.

This is another favorite of mine.


Here is an article featuring the 2007 Festival, with more photos.

I don't buy it

I saw a post linked to notmartha.org for something called the Little Brown Dress project. A Seattle woman wore the same brown dress that she made, everyday for a year, as both performance art and a statement about consumerism. She was especially speaking to that which women are encouraged to participate in, mainly in buying clothes that "express" who we are. I was very intrigued- she did add sweaters and even jeans in cold weather, but she actually pulled it off.

While I think what she did was interesting and pretty great, I think the most impactful part was the blog/journal she kept- that is really the daunting part to me. But it renewed my interest in something I read about in the paper, about a group of people who made a commitment to not buy anything new for a year.

So Hillary and I, over beers, of course, decided that we would challenge ourselves, starting Thursday May 10, to not buy anything new that we absolutely cannot get used.

Kennet and Chris were encouraged to join us, but politely declined. Neither of them are big shoppers anyway, so they instead will be part of the tribunal (more on that in a moment).

So there are a couple of rules, some things that are exempt, and a process for deciding the unclear purchases. First, consumables are exempt: this includes food, toothpaste, lightbulbs, but also safety items like brake pads for our bikes. Second, we talked long and hard about materials for the craft/art works in progress- we will make a best effort to reuse or buy second hand supplies (like fabric), but somethings are impossible to get used, like ink, or thread.

Hillary is allowed to buy rechargeable batteries at some point, as well as a new battery for her phone, because those require either buying a new phone or presenting a hardship that would be unrealistic. Other things, like book club books, can be bought new if they are required but cannot be found at the libary or used. We could also plan to share one copy. Music was hard too, we decided that Itunes are ok, because they don't require the purchasing of a physical object. Classes, services, transportation, all ok.

Magazines were hard, because I especially love magazines. Kennet says they count as a consumable, though Hillary and I decided we would try to share a couple of subscriptions.

Why? you might ask. The main reason is to cut down on the amount of stuff I buy that I do not need. Kennet pointed out that you can count anything as a consumable as long as you use it until it is no longer usable. For him, this would include clothes, which he generally wears until they can be worn no longer. I do not follow this rule and so clothes are out for me. However, buying clothes at Buffalo Exchange lets me aquire new, fun things, without spending armloads of money.
It's also an impact issue, cutting down on how tied to "things" I am, lowering my ecological footprint, contributing less waste.


Generally the things I spend money on, besides necessities, are clothes, music, and craft supplies. So I suspect I'll save a lot of money on clothes this year. Which is a good thing.

And if something does not fit neatly into the above categories, or if we feel we have a justified reason for buying something, Kennet and Chris will round out The Tribunal, the group of 3 that will be consulted and will vote on whether a purchase should be made. Shotguns are optional.

A very small thumb

One of the nice perks of my work is having garden educators as colleagues who are enthusiastic to share the garden with not only the kids who visit us, but the rest of us lowly staff folk. Last year, Kennet's Dad helped me make these flower boxes for our deck (with my broken elbow and all) and last year I killed a pitiful number of sad looking swiss chard and pea plants that never got bigger than my pinkie. This year I'm determined to turn things around, owing mostly to worm feces. How can you not love that? My favorite thing about this process is that I realized that since I've been carting our food scraps over to the worm bin at work in my panniers intermittently for a year now, I could reasonably claim that our old food scraps have come full circle to help nourish our new baby plants.

So here are parsley and peas, tied up with Hillary-esque orange string, lettuce starts, and some oregano and sage. Rachael also gave me some onions and some cilantro seeds- cool fact: Did you know cilantro and coriander are the same plant? Who knew.

Flock 643

A few months ago Hillary had a gallery showing of this piece that she's been working on at least as long as I've known her. She spent the last few years folding paper cranes out of receipts and atm slips and here is the final result. It was a fun event, with real wine and cheese and other arty people.


Click on it to make it bigger to see it better. It was one of the few pieces put up on this brick wall, which I loved. Very cool.

Old tech meets high tech

I have boxes and boxes (ok, small boxes) of photographs and negatives that came from my mom's parents' house. Many of the photos are from North Dakota, where my grandparents were both raised on farms before moving to Portland to raise my mom and her sisters in the house my grandfather built (below).

Now that we have a good scanner that also scans negatives, I'm slowly working my way through digitizing them 1) to preserve the images and 2) to find out what the heck is on all those negatives. (a light box might help too, but we don't have one of those.) So far, it's a relatively easy, but slow process. The pictures look pretty good on the computer, though, and I'm pretty happy to have them collected in one place. I have seen some neat projects that involve printing the pictures on fabric or iron-on transfers and then sewing them into things. My mom went through them with me and tried to do her best to identify the subjects, but some of them we don't have a clue about. Here are a few highlights. The quality has deteriorated, but you can click on them to make them bigger and easier to see.

































I particularly like these ones- I'm sure there is some technical name for the format, but they just look neat to me. The one on top is my grandfather, I would guess in his 20s, so late 1930s maybe. We think the bottom one has my grandmother on the right side of it, on the horse back in North Dakota.

The picture at the beginning has my great grandparents in it, Aquilinius and Clementina (or is it Clementine?). I'm pretty sure they're the two on the far right and far left. They were both born in Ukraine, where their families had moved from Germany. If the internet geneology people are right, they were married in Richardton, North Dakota in 1906.

Schadenfreude: road rage and instant karma

I think I chuckled steadily the last two miles of my bike ride home today. I saw something so funny, so beautifully scripted, that I could never have dreamed it up myself in a million years.

The I-90 bike path has a couple of pedestrian crossings: red lights in the middle of the block, with no cross street, just the bike path. The cycle is pretty long, so it's standard procedure for cyclists and pedestrians, even little old ladies, to look both ways and cross against the red. I should note here that simply looking both ways is not sufficient to keep from getting hit by cars. You also have to pay attention to what you see and behave accordingly.

When I got to the light, there was a pretty steady stream of cars. It was clear I was going to have to wait for the light to turn, no biggie. From the bike path behind me emerged a vile creature, a being made entirely of sinew, carbon-fiber, spandex and ego. Waiting for the light was not in the repertoire of this 2 wheeled thing from beyond. He looked both ways, saw the slightest gap between two cars, and sprinted through it. The oncoming driver slammed on his brakes and released a astoundingly civil little "toot" from his horn. This wasn't honking in vain. This wasn't a five-second burst on the horn with the volume turned up to eleven. This was the kind of horn blast that conveys no anger, just a reminder, "Hey! I exist."

Now this is where it gets funny...
The spandex-monster, who was by now on the bike path across the street, stood up in his pedals, craned his neck around, gave the driver the bird, failed to see the left bend in the path in front of him, ran off the trail into the grass, into a bush, and fell over in his clips.

...
I'm gonna let that mental image soak in for a second.
...

Now I'd like to point out that there were three bikers other than me patiently waiting for the light to change. Two were forty-something ladies out for a pleasure ride, and the third was an older gentleman who looks like he might've stormed Omaha beach, and is still in shape to do it again next Tuesday if he had to. All four of us laughed our heads off. "Señor macho" was still picking himself up off the ground when the older guy and I passed him (on the path, I might add), chuckling loudly. Hopefully he learned something today.

What can we learn from this scene? The data suggests that 80% of bikers enjoy watching irredeemable jerks get theirs. The other 20% of bikers might also enjoy watching irredeemable jerks get theirs, but he was too busy getting his to participate. Other than that, we can't draw any conclusions about bikers. Here's why.

Bikers are people. At any given time, all people are playing one of three roles: jerk, idiot, and decent human being. Everyone plays all of these roles at various times. Good people try to keep it skewed towards the third, but nobody's successful all the time. The Seattle PI has been running a lot of articles about Seattle's "Master Plan" for bikes. Inevitably, the PI's discussion boards are filled with angry drivers and bikers, hurling tirades about how awful the other group is.

Why must we phrase the discussion in terms of "bikers" and "drivers?" Why can't we phrase it in terms of jerks, idiots, and decent human beings?

Low-tech solutions to problems the world shouldn't have in the first place: part 1 of N

I've been receiving a truly absurd number of "phishing" emails recently. It appears Western Union really wants me to validate my account information. This got me wondering, what's the signal to noise ratio of responses to phishing scams? Put another way, how many people who respond to phishing scams, respond with valid account information?

Without any real data to go on, the cynic in me says that the majority, or at least a significant minority of phishing responses contain genuine account information. If that's the case, all we need to do is bump up the noise a little bit. What if every time you got a bogus email, you responded to it with some plausible but incorrect account info? Better yet, put a button on your email reader that'll do it for you?

The question now is, how time-intensive is it for a phisher to verify an account name and password? If they are doing it by hand, then it wouldn't take that many participating people to make it not worth a phisher's effort. If they're doing it via a script, well then bogus information would only be wasting computer time, and that's cheap.

Anyone who actually knows something about the world of phishing scams care to chime in? Has this approach been tried before? Are there any downsides? The thought occurs to me that by responding to a phisher, even with bogus info, you may be confirming that your email account is "live" which might result in more spam.

Lensbabies Part Two

And here's one more from the Lensbaby/film experiment. Birthday flowers were involved.

The K1000s came out to play

My first camera was a Pentax K1000, it was a Christmas present my freshman year of high school. For those of you who don't know, the K1000 is the quintessential student camera. It's fully manual, has the barest of controls, almost no electronics, is built like a brick and weighs about the same. It's the kind of camera that would be on the A-team if you were plotting an expedition to Kafiristan with Peachy Carnehan and Daniel Dravot. If I were Charlton Heston, I'd have something to say about my K1000 and my cold, dead hands.

Unfortunately, as much as I love my K1000, it's gone kinda by the wayside. Digital photography isn't just incrementally better, it's so much better as to qualify as an entirely different and superior way of doing things. Now I can take twenty times as many pictures because I know that I'm not paying for them (or rather, I already have paid for them). I get instant results, so if I mess up a picture, I can adjust and try again. I can work wonders in post-processing, turning crap into something I'd actually want to show my friends. I'm sorry, poor little K1000, I love you but you're just not on the A-team anymore.

A little while ago, on a whim, I got a Pentax K-mount Lensbaby 3G.
This was precipitated by the photo-contest over at The Range Life, in which I've been much more of a bystander than a participant. The main thing that I noticed is that most of the photographers there don't use out-of-focus areas in their composition. Everything is in-focus, at least that's what they're striving for.

So there I was, with a funny little lens, and only my K1000 to mount it on. The scene could've been straight out of my elementary school rendition of Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer. K1000 to the rescue. I buckled down, bought a roll of film, took some photos without knowing immediately how they turned out (gasp), got them developed, and scanned the negatives.

This also resulted in Shelley busting out her cute little K1000 and a geek-out session where I drooled over her sexy little 50mm/F2.0 Pentax prime. As great as digital is, it will be a sad world when parents don't buy high school students moderately priced cameras that are built to last a lifetime. I have a hope, that maybe once digital photography gets a little more settled, we'll see a return of a $300 SLR body that is "good enough," not packed with every feature under the sun, and built to stand up to years of use.

So, this is all a very long-winded of saying that it's really film's fault that I haven't posted on the blog in a while. Simply put, I've been waiting to finish a roll of film. There will be a few successive blog posts, since that roll of film contains a backlog of photos from various events.

In the mean time I'll leave you with one photo from the last hurrah of my K1000 and the first hurrah of the season from the Wenatchee river.

Parental Release Forms

My friends and co-workers Rachael and Scott have a small farm on Marrowstone Island (near Port Townsend) where they have 3 goats. Two have had babies in the last week and Maddi and I took a road trip to see them. There are four altogether, two boys and two girls. The boys are named Chop and T-bone, which I'm a little pissed about because I claimed T-bone as my future dog's name long ago and was not consulted about this decision.

The girls are still awaiting names, but we talked today about tree names- babies often get named with a theme and each name starts with the same letter as their mother's so you can tell the lineage.





I can't tell them apart for the life of me, so I can't tell you which one this is. See more photos here.


The mamas and the babies love this mound of dirt piled up from a recent septic system dig - some kind of king of the hill complex or something. Scott says they're just learning how to headbutt- amazing how independent they are for only being four days old.

Oh and the title is in reference to Rachael's response to my question about putting the babies on the blog- while we did not get goat mama's permission, no animals were harmed in the making of this posting.

Pleasing the 4-5 year old set

Wow, I can't believe it's been so long since a post. Sorry about that- hopefully we didn't lose anyone.


Here are two successful projects for the 4-5 year olds I know. My nephew Will got the Fuzzbot shirt. For a while I walked around the house after him saying bee boop bop every time he poked Fuzzbots buttons.

My friend Cathy's son Connor wanted fingerless gloves so much he was trying to cut the fingers off of his regular gloves. So I came up with a simple pattern that worked out ok, though I think they're still too short. These are the kind of gloves that will need to be remade every month or two- they seem to be well worn (see photo- yes, Cathy says he is actually asleep).