Temperature's Risin'

MERCURIAL: Last night about dinnertime, Annabelle started complaining of a sore throat. During dinner, she started drooping, and by bedtime she was running what felt to the touch to be a high fever.

She slept between me and Christian last night. We gave her a dose of ibuprofen at 11:30 p.m. and again at 5:30 a.m. I think we each kept a hand on her all night to monitor her temperature.

This morning, I rooted around and I found an old digital thermometer. Annabelle registered 103.7. Thinking/hoping it was wrong, I tried it on myself. 98.7. I re-took hers, it read 103.7 again. Not good.

I called Rick and hobbled over to sit with Bee while I ripped over to Alberstons. I bought several types of juices and some frozen push up thingees for her. She has partaken of both and isn't worse, but isn't any better as of this evening.

She's had her good moments and her bad moments today. But she's young and resilient - hopefully by tomorrow, she'll be a healthy person. Meanwhile, fingers and toes are crossed here that no one else gets it.
ON A WING AND A PRAYER: Did you know that August 19 is National Aviation Day? The holiday was established by Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1939, he issued a presidential proclamation designating the anniversary of Orville Wright's birthday to be National Aviation Day.

To note the occasion, we watched a BrainPOP movie about flight. It did a wonderful job of explaining the concepts of weight, lift, thrust and drag. We learned In order for a plane to be able to fly, lift has to be greater than or equal to weight, and to move forward, thrust needs to be greater than drag.

Other aviation-related terms we learned about are airfoil, high pressure, low pressure, ailerons, elevators and rudder.
The kids took a review quiz afterward and got all but one of the questions right. We also checked out the "FYI: Read More" feature about sonic booms. We heard a couple of sonic booms on Tuesday, when President Obama was in town.

From BrainPOP we learned, "When something moves through the air, it makes waves around it. ... These waves move at Mach 1, the speed of sound. As an aircraft approaches Mach 1, the air waves begin to pile up on each other, since they can no longer get out of each other's way." BrianPOP explained that when this air wave build up happens, you can see a cone- or cup-shaped cloud form around the plane. That's exactly what we saw when we saw the F-18s flying over Lake Washington during Seafair (you can see the cone emerging in the photo I took below; they purposely kept their speed just barely sub-sonic during the show, though. IDEA BOOK: Yesterday, I received a magazine called The Idea Book. It's a publication for educators from the A&E, Lifetime, History and Bio networks.

Its features articles include a story about the history of Halloween and "How the States got Their Shapes." Each story has a list of discussion questions, vocabulary, related Web sites and books, plus extended activities. There is also info about when related shows air on the networks. Good stuff - and it was free!

DIARY DAY TWO: This morning I wanted to continue our "Diary of a ..." journaling. I asked Annabelle if she felt up to it. She said she did. However, when pushing pencil came to shove, she just couldn't rally. After writing Thursday, August 19 on her sheet, she begged off.

CJ completed his entry. He wrote

Diary of a Dog, Thursday, August 19

Today I went to a restaurant. I ate a cheeseburger with
ketchup mustrd mayo relish.

His "illustration" was was words "Come in!" He said it's the sign on the restaurant, as seen through the dog's eyes.

PIC ME: This afternoon Annabelle rallied for a bit (the right mix of ibuprofen, organic vanilla milk and a few M&Ms). She asked to play Sprout online. Once there, she implored me to upload a photo of her to the PicMe portion of the site. The site suggests a good, clear face shot, so I chose the photo of Annabelle taken on the day she lost her first tooth. That's a good mug shot.

Once it was uploaded, I was able to do a bit of resizing and drag some clipping points around her hairline and then Presto! she became a cartoon. I must say, it's pretty darn cute. This is a screenshot; in the online version, she was dancing and playing the maracas.
Once the photo was uploaded, she could watch a trailer, play some games and print some activity sheets out, all featuring her mug. She dug it!

I called CJ over to check out the site. He politely took a look but told me he definitely did NOT want to be cartooned.

ROYAL BALLET: Although Annabelle was in no dancing mood herself today, I thought she might get a boost out of watching a ballet DVD from the library. I chose "Nutcracker Sweet" by The Toy Castle. It featured a collection of short stories/programs performed by members of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. The costumes were awesome and the music and storytelling were engaging. BOTH of the kids watched the whole thing. After the short stories were over, we popped the DVD into my computer's CD drive and Annabelle played several Flash animated games.

GENIE IN A CARTRIDGE: This evening CJ finally got a chance to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new mushrooms and new uncivilized enemies. To boldy go where no Mario has gone before ...!

A few weeks back, I saw an old school Game Genie laying in a bin with electronic equipment at a local Goodwill store. I knew what it was from when Rick and Ken were little kids. As Wikipedia describes it, the Game Genie "is known as the first example of consumer-friendly 'game enhancement' by means of (temporarily) directly altering the binary code of a game." You have no idea how happy this makes CJ, whose head is constantly swimming with hacks he wants to attempt and code he wants to write.

Tonight, CJ and Christian played around with the Game Genie using Super Mario Bros. on the NES. (That's pretty old school - that game/system bundle came out in North America in March of 1986.)

At first CJ and Christian were using Game Genie codes they found on the Internet. Those let them fast forward to advanced levels in the game, speed things up and so on. Before long, Christian started making codes up for CJ to try, and they discovered some wild and wacky levels definitely not part of standard game play. They had a blast.