The unbearable lightness of being

I finally watched "Gravity" this weekend. I confess that, even in my extremely limited understanding of astrophysics, I was distracted by things careening when I thought maybe they wouldn't actually BE careening. The most stressful moments, for me, were when she finally got in those escape pods and the entire control board was in Cyrillic, and then Chinese characters. FRAUGHT. Because even if one is a brilliant medical engineer, one cannot possibly be expected to READ RUSSIAN AND CHINESE after only SIX months of astronaut training!! I actually mentioned this at church on Sunday to my friend Kelly's husband, who is a pilot in the Air Force, and he said that there was part of his training during which he was required to jump into planes manufactured in Russia and China and figure out how to fly them. He said the pilots before him had left POST-IT NOTES on the buttons to help with translating. Good GRIEF, can you even imagine?

Anyway, we took the canoe out again on Saturday, and I realized that there are many moments in my life during which I feel as though the entire control board is in a language I can't read. For example, "helping" the husband get the canoe loaded onto the top of the minivan. Also, in "helping" get the canoe down to the river. Also, in paddling the canoe in such a way that we don't run directly into river detritus. We launched into the Brazos River, and the husband was clanking with all manner of weaponry because of rumors of alligators and venomous snakes and even bobcats. Much to his and the kids' disappointment, the only wildlife we encountered was dragonflies, a Great Blue Heron, and a few other tiny, harmless waterfowl. Helena sits at the very front. Here she is, lolling:

 It is only natural that you are envious of my hat. Perhaps it is what scared off the alligators, venomous snakes, and bobcats?

On a related note, gravity and other physics concepts were rather unkind to Harper on the playground after school yesterday. She was running after a soccer ball and ran directly in front of a little girl who was swinging. Harper got a foot to the jaw, which was actually powerful enough to knock her into the air, and then unceremoniously dump her back down to earth. She was affronted, even as I explained that the swinging girl was utterly without fault. (Just for future reference, a wailing child is not easily comforted by a mini-lecture on potential and kinetic energy.) It was all very noisy, but she seems completely recovered today. It was actually a great time to remind her of an incident last week in which she tagged a little girl with too much force while they were both running at full speed, and the little girl tripped and tumbled heels over head, scraping various parts of her body. Moral: sometimes we ourselves are wounded by physics, and sometimes we ourselves are the vehicle for wounding others.