This post was originally posted unfinished, because I fell asleep. I do that sometimes. It is not a good idea to hit buttons on the computer when one is falling asleep, or one might hit "publish" instead of "draft". It has now been modified and finished, sort of.  You get what you pay for around here.

Spaz takes classes on Fridays, and some of them, including his science class, involve homework. That is a good thing. His class is studying physics, and one of his assignments last week was to go to a website where he could "build" a roller coaster and adjust various factors such as speed, friction, and angle until his car was able to run the entire track without coming to a stop or falling off.

Which is a noble and lofty goal, of course, but as any mother of a boy would know, it is ever so much more fun to make the car fall off.

Spaz dutifully adjusted everything in such a way as to let the car complete its run, thereby fulfilling the assignment. That took perhaps four minutes. He then spent the next twenty minutes playing with the controls and adjusting all the factors to provide for maximum spills and thrills. Especially spills.

"I am the evil roller coaster engineer!" he'd cry gleefully as the car plummeted off the track for the umpteenth time and hurtled off the screen. "I like to send people to their deaths! Ahahahahaha!" I know this sounds six-year-oldish, and indeed it is. Spaz is a perpetual child-at-heart, at the moment fourteen-going-on-seven, but someday forty-going-on-nine.

And so the animated "roller coaster of death" continued to plummet off the track and the boy continued to exult in his evilness and the girl continued to look on with interest and the mom continued to say, "We need to turn the computer off now and move on to other things," and the boy continued to say, "Just one more time, pleeeeaaaase?"

Who says physics can't be fun?