Erin Goes Binary

In school we learnt about gravity. Not quite the inverse square law yet, but we started with balloons and had to make a balloon travel exactly 2 metres using string, sticky tape, a straw and a paper clip. The winners tied their string through the straw to 2 points 2 metres apart but at different heights, tied the balloon to the straw and slid it down the slope. Our balloon burst so we failed, I blame inferior experimental lab equipment, plus it was in the runes, and when we examined the guts of that dead sparrow, it was bound to happen.
We have to learn to count up to and down from one million. This will be a very big game of hide'n'seek. We also had to make a magazine article about Beowulf (Denmark Disaster!). Erin got her bath plug and we all sang happy birthday, for she is now in double figures and had a girls-only party at her place.
Ben has got into the basketball team (even though white men can't jump) so we didn't take him home and he appeared at the park as usual. Then it was back to old times, with the JBs and Owen the Destroyer and lots of other faces I know. But when we started kicking the ball around and got told off, we noticed that as we'd got older, the faces in the park get younger and smaller and nowadays we're the older, tougher, more boisterous lads from whom we used to hide.
We did Giant tennis Ball Tag and piggy in the middle on the bouncers and so forth but once one had got the ball in the face and another had over-reacted and I went into a sulk, it was time to depart. I'd done a creditable 90 minutes of running around in the sun so definitely worth doing.
Today the Queen got to be the longest-running British Monarch ever, even more than good old Victoria. If I owned Windsor castle I wouldn't move out in a hurry either. But the Americans probably didn't notice as it was Official Wiener Schnitzel Day.