Kelly co-opted Christian in her big gingerbread house project yesterday and it brought back all kinds of good memories. Christian cannot help himself when it comes to this kind of thing. Christian wants the most artistically creative design possible, but adequate actualization of the design is not really possible without proper attention to even the most minute of details.  Kiwi cannot help herself either.  She is a people cat. Very social. A warm keyboard with people around is as good as it gets. This is precisely how Christian spent his college years–sitting at the bar with Rubix (Kiwi is the surviving twin cat sister and has filled in nicely now that Rubix is gone) laying on his arms or on the keyboard while Lorena and Kelly are cooking something in the kitchen. That purple and orange thing behind the computer is the bluetooth speaker with traditional Christmas music providing a nice background.

Christian worked on this quite a long time. The  stencils for the design, based on Kelly’s absolute requirement to make an English manor, are now ready for the cooking of the gingerbread which should happen sometime starting this afternoon. Some of the pieces are pretty small, so we will have to see how it goes–improvisation and Engineering Change Orders might be necessary depending on suitability of the materials and implementation methods to the design. All good engineers can improvise when needed. Here is a closeup of the design below. Some of Christian’s notebooks (this is typical) are pretty amazing. They are a lot more cryptic these days as he is doing things in the bowels of theoretical Information Theory that is beyond our understanding. It is nice to see this throwback to some of his earlier work in homeschool and his undergraduate degree.