Certified Plane

“Am I bleeding yet?” Bob asked, perched like a bird on the top of the jungle gym.

He was not.

“Aw, I wanna bleed!”

Typical. If anyone was going to draw blood after school, it was Bob. And he had done that once this week already.

“I love pain!”

Yali didn’t seem to mind it too much either. He was generally safe with Heidi and Annie-Bea. But with the boys… that was always up for debate. Usually because he ended up in some kind of cardboard box toboggan, careening down the carpeted hallways. And yet no matter the damage, it usually ended up in an eruption of giggles, on all their parts.

Good news for Francis. He had just passed his six-hour Airframe test (which was necessary to work on aircraft in the near future), apparently the first student to do so in that program in fifteen, twenty years or more. So when he walked in for Gloria’s chicken wings at movie night, the siblings greeted him with a rousing chorus of, “For he’s a jolly good fellow!” which he did not seem to mind.

And as Thunderbird later asked him, “So are you a certified airplane now?”

Francis was pretty pleased with the results of his testing as he dug into a huge plate stuffed with chicken wings and potatoes.

“Dear diary,” Elmer imitated him in a sing-song voice, “Today I worked on a Beechcraft! It was so pretty!”

One step closer to his goal.

Meanwhile, Elmer was turning 28 on Saturday, so we made it a double celebration of chicken wings while he hunted a rogue fly through the kitchen with a fly swatter.

We ended up in the basement with a plate of Carrie-Bri’s cherry chocolate blondies and a very unconventional movie night selection by way of Alfred Hitchcock’s “To Catch a Thief”.