While on vacation, Sarah Phillips tries her hand at rally racing with the instruction of her brothers. Their car catches on fire and they lose their exhaust system. Thankfully, writes Sarah, "you can fix just about anything with electrical tape."

Rob Gardner helps coach a Chicago Little League baseball team to a championship victory. He promises himself that he will continue to make time to volunteer, something that he was not able to do earlier in his demanding physics career. "I've decided it's not going to be like that anymore, regardless of the crisis du jour."

Triumphs in computing
Gordon Watts attempts to squash a particularly persistent computer bug this week. "This bug is starting to feel more like one of those greased watermelons you had to catch at county fairs in those contests as a kid!" he writes.

Rob Gardner attends a workshop on computing, where the question of the day is "how hard could this be?"

Despite Ursula Bassler's complaints about the C++ programming language, it seems that she is something of a whiz. She gets a rare compliment on the success of her newest software. "Recognition is just sweet soother for the soul," she writes.