Zakhar (up top, happily sticking out his tongue) turned 8 today. The kids came over, and the place is literally in total chaos. I’m hiding from this gang and trying to figure out how to get out of tomorrow’s inevitable task of scrubbing cotton candy off the furniture. It also makes me think that it’s a good time to be a kid. When I was growing up, the only "fun and educational chemistry experiments" we had were carbide and an empty dichlorvos can (a Soviet-era insecticide aerosol can).