Many of you seem to think that the parents can't really be as bad as I make them out to be. "Surely," you say, "this must all just be some sort of misunderstanding." Very well, I will present you with the facts, and you may draw your own conclusions.

I have a faithful little duck. He is small and yellow, and always shows up when I take a bath. On his bottom are the letters H-O-T. He doesn't say much, but I know I can count on him and we've grown quite close.

I never gave much thought to where he went after bath time. I guess I just assumed he went back to his little duck family. I wish I had never discovered the truth. You can imagine my horror when, as I was innocently exploring the cabinets under the bathroom sink, I found him trapped there in the dark. I couldn't imagine why he was there. Maybe he'd been looking in the cabinets too, and the door accidentally closed on him. Naturally, I set him free. How could I leave my good friend in such a state?

The next day, I found him locked up under the sink again. I tried to free him, but Mommy stopped me. "Leave the ducky in there, Miranda," she said. I protested, but she was unrelenting. However, I am more agile and clever than the parents. I grabbed my friend and ran for it. Unfortunately, Mommy eventually trapped me. She grabbed duck and put him right back under the sink, then carried me away.

You tell me. Are the parents really as bad as I have said?

The strategy of saying "No" to the parents has hit a snag. You see, it turns out that they apparently don't understand their own language. I tell them "No" and they just ignore me and insist that I do what they said anyhow. Sometimes, and I know this will come as a shock to many of you, they even physically force me to comply. It became obvious that I needed to rethink my strategy.

I am not going to lose this battle. If I can't overcome them directly, I'll wear them down slowly until they beg for mercy. At first I couldn't understand their defiance, but then I realized the truth: All of these so called "naps" and "bedtimes" that they say are for my own benefit are actually when they plot against me! I cannot allow this to continue any longer. I will never take another nap. I will refuse their bedtimes. If necessary, I will even start screaming in the middle of the night, just to make sure they remember who is in charge here.

Your move, parents.

As promised, my offensive against the parents has begun in earnest. I can only hope that putting my foot down now will help them in the future. When parents start acting like they're in control, it's just as bad for them as it is for everyone else. I just need to keep reminding myself of that. Though it may seem harsh in the moment, it's for their long-term good.

The key to restoring the proper order is to assert my dominance. I realize now that my former leniency emboldened them to take so many liberties. To that end, I have developed a simple yet effective strategy to reverse this course: No matter what the parents say, I respond with "No". Sometimes several in a row, if I feel the situation warrants it. I feel a bit cruel, using their own language against them, but they're the ones who drove me to it.

I expect the parents' full surrender in a matter of days. Long live the queen.

I have put up with a lot from the parents. Most would consider it too much. I've tried my best to do everything I know for them. I even went so far as to figure out their silly moon language so I can tell them exactly what I want in terms they cannot misunderstand.

You can, of course, imagine my frustration that, after all my hard work, the parents just keep making things more difficult. I tell them exactly what to give me, and they look at me and go "Say please." Then I've got to repeat the whole thing back to them with "please" on the end, as though they don't understand without it. I should have drawn the line right there, but out of the goodness of my heart I played along with their game.

Now, even that's not enough for the parents. I tell them what I want. I even say "please", and they'll say something like "Not right now" or "We can't." I did not learn their language just to have them deny my requests. Listen, I can put up with a lot of nonsense, but even I can only be pushed so far, and here is where I draw the line. This means war.

It appears that the evil plot of the parents has been foiled. Not only am I still alive, but I'm feeling much better. Meanwhile, the parents are coughing and blowing their runny noses. Enjoy a taste of your own "medicine", parents. Vindication is so sweet. I hope they've learned their lesson.

The parents are trying to kill me. It all started a few days ago. I was just minding my own business when Mommy pulled out a piece of paper and started wiping my nose. Now, I admit, my nose was feeling a bit funny, so I let her do it. Before I know it, she's pulling out this "medicine" stuff. "It'll make you feel better," she said.

Surprisingly, it tasted really good, which should have been my first warning sign. I never get anything that tastes really good without begging for it. It was okay at first, but the next morning my throat started to hurt really bad. I still didn't see the connection, even when Mommy insisted that I take more "medicine". Now my throat and my nose are hurting even more. My tummy doesn't feel good, and I can barely eat anything. It's official: The parents have poisoned me. Farewell to all of my loyal readers. Remember me fondly.

I moved to a new house! Apparently Mommy and Daddy didn't like it, though, because we moved back to the old one again.

It was a lot bigger than this house, but for some reason we only went into a few of the rooms. Maybe if we'd lived there longer I would have gotten to visit the rest of them. One small room had buttons on the wall that Mommy and Daddy wouldn't let me touch. The problem is, there was something structurally wrong with that room. At times it felt like the floor was falling out from under me. I did not like that. Also, I don't know why we even bothered going to that room, since Mommy and Daddy just stood there until the door opened and we left again. That's probably what made them decide to move back here.

The room we spent most of our time in had a great toy telephone. It was so cool. It had way more buttons than my phones here at the old house, and when I pressed the big red button at the bottom this guy's voice started talking. It seemed really great, but then Daddy pulled its plug and it stopped talking before I could investigate further.

The nice thing about our new house was all the cars that passed by the window. At that house there were more cars in a minute than I see in a week here, coming from every direction. All kinds of cars. Big ones. Ones with flashing lights. It was great fun, and I made sure to tell Mommy and Daddy whenever I saw one. I could have watched them all day, but for some reason Daddy wanted to leave.

In fact, we didn't spend much time at the new house. As soon as I woke up Daddy wanted to go to some other big building. I don't know what he was so excited about, but he'd stay there forever. We'd only get back to the new house when it was time for bed.

I miss my new house.

The Krypton Cougars are back in action. After their banner performance last year, the students were eager to learn from their mistakes and made an exhaustive list of everything they wanted to do better, presumably so they could pointedly ignore it.

Last year the battery was very hard to replace, causing much frustration during and after the competition season. One student ended up becoming the designated battery installation expert, and that could only be done in a timely manner if the robot was held up in the air. For 2017, the team decided that wasn't nearly difficult enough, and buried the battery even deeper in the depths of the robot. It now requires two or three students to replace a battery, after moving multiple robot mechanisms out of the way.

Last year the team divided their focus between too many things, and vowed this season they would streamline aggressively. When the game was revealed, the first meeting was to discuss what game elements the team would target and which they would ignore. The team decided that the fractional point value of fuel made it unnecessary, and that the forty-point gears and fifty-point climbing were much more important. They then spent half of build season designing a hopper and loader for fuel. Which leads us to the next improvement...

Last year the robot was not mechanically completed until the last moment. The programmers were forced to program on the car ride to the competition. We agreed that this year we'd finish all mechanical changes at least a week before the end of build season, giving our programmers and drivers the time they needed. Naturally, the mechanical team decided that prototyping the fuel hopper system took priority over programming and driver practice, leaving the programmers to test their changes in the gaps. An additional motor was added to the robot, for the hopper, the night the team arrived at the competition, which the programmers did not find out about until the night before. It was programmed at the competition. The drivers got no practice time.

With this auspicious start, our team could not help but have a great first competition. One thing you must do at an FRC competition, after getting your robot unpacked, is have the robot's on-board radio re-imaged for the field. Until this is complete, and your robot is inspected, you can't do much. There were already a few teams in line before us, and they seemed to be having trouble.

"Did you update your firmware?" the technical assistant would ask.

"Yes," they replied confidently. Then they'd plug in their radio, enter their team number, and then watch as a large error dialog appeared. Three teams in a row did this, so when it was our turn I was a bit worried.

"Did you update your firmware?" The last update we'd done had been the last week of build season. I hadn't seen a notice of any new changes, but how could all of these other teams not have updated their radios in three weeks?

We plugged in our radio, entered our team number, and hit the "Configure" button. A progress bar appeared on the screen. A few seconds later our radio was successfully imaged. We took it back to the pits and plugged it into the robot.

I suppose at this point I should mention that this is the first year our team has used a co-processor for vision. It's a second computer with 192 GPU cores, and it can process two different camera feeds for different targets and stream video feeds and target information back over the network to our drivers. It's one of the programming team's several amazing achievements this season. We rely on this vision information to drive our robot, both autonomously and when we need extra precision under human control. After the radio was re-imaged, this vital co-processor disappeared from the network.

By that time it was getting late in the evening, and Miranda had only had a short nap on the ride out, so I had to leave so we could put her to bed. Back at the hotel, I provided tech support via text message. The core problem was somewhat obvious. With …

The parents don't play fair. Just the other day I discovered that they've been holding out on me. Here's what happened. A friend came over to play and mommy gave him pages with pictures but no colors on them. Then she gave him some sticks and suddenly there was color!

These sticks are the most amazing things ever! I demanded mommy give me one of them, and immediately put it to use. I spent hours putting color on every picture mommy gave me. I even put color on some pages that didn't have pictures. It was great.

Being the innovator that I am, I quickly realized that mommy had not even begun to grasp the potential of these magic color sticks. I gathered a few and hurried off to a secluded area where I could focus on my art. Fortunately, there are many large surfaces perfectly suited for coloring in the house. Unfortunately, like so many great artists who have gone before, it seems that I must suffer for my art.

Now mommy counts all of my color sticks and makes sure that I don't have any on my person before she releases me from my chair. Who knew the parents had such a hatred for art?

Steve was the type of man that our modern age believes extinct. He was an old man at forty-nine, grizzled and rough. Most respectable people shied away from him. He wore an old coat, drove a van that couldn't pass inspection, and had a big beard that would have been white if it hadn't been stained yellow by cigarette smoke.

Steve worked for minimum wage, doing landscaping for people better off than himself. He'd been paid more before he took the company truck out after he'd been drinking. Now he was just grateful to have a job. His wife had kicked him out, so his boss let him live in a small shack by the company office, which was an improvement over living in his van. He had no hope for advancement. He was dirt poor and illiterate. The person he cared about most, his granddaughter, wouldn't talk to him. He was a man who had fallen through the cracks of our society.

Steve had gone to church, but he never fit in among the suit-wearing crowd. They were nice enough, but he knew he didn't belong. His life was too checkered to past muster. His theology was a mashup of ideas he'd picked up from various questionable sources. Steve believed that God created life on the outer planets, wiping out each one as it became too wicked, and now it was Earth's turn. He didn't get all the big words the church-people used, but he liked to listen to Christian music. His favorite band was Skillet.

Yet to the few people who really got to know Steve, he was amazing. He was a craftsman who loved nothing more than turning scraps of wood into masterpieces. He volunteered his ample free time to build sets for local plays. Despite everything that had been done to him, Steve had a heart of gold. He was eager to help anyone, even those who hurt him. While Steve might not have known how to read, he was a force to be reckoned with at the checkerboard. No matter who he played, he'd find their weakness and end up with the last checker every time.

Steve died of a brain aneurysm the day after Thanksgiving, and to most people his life was the example they tell their children to avoid. It's true, he made poor choices and gained little in this world. Yet something in Steve was so winsome that it really makes me question whether he didn't know something the rest of us miss. Farewell Steve. You are missed.