Friday Follies

PLAY THE RAINBOW: I'm trying to keep Friday mornings music-oriented during our summer hiatus from Musikgarten. This morning I was going to have the kids break out their glockenspiels, but it was so damn hot even by 9 a.m. I was thinking about water-water-water and like a bolt from the blue I thought, "Oooh, I'll bet they'd like to play water-filled glasses for a change."
I scrounged up different sizes and shapes and filled them to varying levels. While I was doing this, Annabelle deduced, "You're making a water xylophone, aren't you?!" I asked her where she'd heard that term before and she said it was on "Blue's Clues." Good memory!

I thought it would be a lot more fun - and easier for the kids to remember playing patterns - if the water was colored, so we broke out the cake decorating dye and put a couple of drops in each glass.

First, I had the kids hit each glass and together they determined a low-to-high note scale and lined the glasses up in that order.

Next, I let each of the have some time doing free-form songs. As they were messing around I recognized four notes that a bored deep into my brain. I played the opening riff from Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on the glasses for them and asked them to replicate it. They each got it after just a couple of tries.

I cued up the Nirvana video and had them play along with it. That was a good challenge, as the song is pretty fast and they had to keep up with the pace Kurt, Dave and Krist set.

I left the glasses out on the counter all day long, and Annabelle played them dozens of times. Such a simple way to have some musical fun!

FOLLOW YOUR NOSE: This afternoon we headed to Swanson's - my favorite nursery in Seattle (at least so far). Since it was so hot (90-plus) there weren't a whole lot of people perusing plants. So we had lots of room to roam. We selected several new herb plants for our brand new kitchen window shelf. We also bought a palm tree for the top of the lot and a new purplish grass for the 'beauty strip' along the road. As we were meandering I spied a sign I knew CJ would be interested in. I told the kids, "Look to the left and tell me what you see ..."

After a few seconds' delay they both shouted, "Chocolate!"

Surrounding the sign we found dozens of Chocolate Cosmos plants. Naturally, we took a whiff and my-oh-my, they DID smell just like chocolate. Amazing! The bees were loving them - the Chocolate Cosmos had way more bees on them than any other plant I saw at the nursery.

CJ begged me to buy one. Of course I did.

HERE FISHY, FISHY: Adjacent to the nursery's cafe (what, your nursery doesn't have a cafe?), there is a fabulous indoor pond stocked full of humongous koi. Several of them are bigger than, and definitely outweigh, our dog.

The kids asked some good questions while we were there. For instance, CJ wanted to know if they live in saltwater or fresh water (fresh), and he wanted to know if koi means 'fish' in Japanese. I told him no, that koi is a kind of fish (like a Havanese is a kind of dog).

I knew from having written a story about koi before that 'koi' or nishikigoi are pretty varieties of carp (Cyprinus carpio). In fact, nishikigoi means brocaded carp in Japanese.

The koi at Swanson's are always hoping we have food. I swear they act like dogs - they see you coming, approach you, wag their tails and practically beg for food. This one appeared to want to eat my camera ...
CITY CHICKENS: While I was strolling through the NW native plants, I spied a small sign that said, "Live chicks" and had an arrow pointing east. Well you know that we had to check that out!

Sure 'nuff, we found a really groovy chicken coop tucked in a corner of the shade plants greenhouse.

I really, Really, REALLY want to get some city chickens. Seattle is very pro urban chickens - in fact the city just upped the number of chickens city residents can have from three to eight. We can have both hens & roosters so long as the city noise ordinances aren't violated by wee hour crowing.
If/when we ever get this remodeling *&^% under control, we are definitely going to get serious about adopting some fine feathered friends. But just hens, no roosters.

Baby It's Hot Outside

DANCING IN THE DARK: It was the final class of the summer session (that was short!) of ballet today, so we got to sit in today. It was so darn hot that the shades were all drawn and the lights were off. Not the best photo taking environment, but oh well. We still enjoyed the show. :)

Christian was able to get away from work and watch today -although he arrived late and had to leave twice during class because they kept calling : ( . But he got to see plenty of Annabelle's preening. (My, how she loves-loves-loves those floor to ceiling, wall to wall mirrors!)

She did a great job following (anticipating, really) directions and was good at keeping rhythm. She headed up the line every time, with Mrs. Johnston, the teacher, noting that Annabelle was the class's "senior student."

Bee is clearly ready to bump up to the next level of classes, which start in September.

COOL DOWN: On the way home from ballet, we saw that the sprinklers were on at Bay View Park (just a half block from our house). Screech!!!! I quickly pulled the car over for an unscheduled stop. As hot as it was, we simply had to take advantage of the free, high-GPM water action!

SHORT STUFF: This morning I told CJ to get shorts on since it was going to be a hot day. He got shorts on, but there was one little, er, big problem. They were some of his big, Big bro Kennedy's shorts. Oops.

SEATTLE MARIO MAP: Last night I discovered a site that features 8-bit maps of a few major cities. Pixelated and lacking much of the detail you've come to expect from a map, it's no Google Earth, to be sure. However, if you're into old school video games, it's still super cool. :)

I pulled up the site this morning to show CJ. He immediately said, "That's an 8-bit map!" I had him type in our address and we located our neighborhood, and found all of the parks we frequent in Magnolia.
DAMN YANKEES: The Yankees are in town, so you know we were at the ballpark. Who wouldn't want to be sitting outside on a 90-plus degree night, watching the Ms lose to the Yankees with that *&%^$ PayRoid (= Alex Rodriguez = A-Rod = Pay Rod = PayRoid) hitting the &%*$^ game winning RBI for the *&$%&# Yankees. But other than that, it was a lovely night at Safeco Field.


(The photo at the left is of two future Hall of Famers, PayRod @ the plate, with Jeter standing on third.)


There was a a huge crowd tonight at the park. If the temperature hadn't been so oppressive (95 F), it would have been even bigger, no doubt.

Here's a self portrait Annabelle shot @ the field tonight. :)

Sea Songs

MUSIC IN MAGNOLIA: Our love affair with Seattle Public Library's Summer Reading Program continued this afternoon. Today, we were lucky to have the entertainment right in our lil ol' 'hood - at the Magnolia library.

The program was "She Sings Sea Songs" and the performer was Nancy Stewart.

Most of Nancy's songs today were about the sea or sea creatures, including a catchy ditties about cephalopods (there's a good vocabulary word for the kids!) and sea stars.
During her song "Shells," the free/featured song on her Web site this month, she accompanied herself on an African tambourine made from a gourd and shells. She pointed us in the direction of her Web site, where there are instructions how to make a facsimile of one from paper mache. The kids - Annabelle especially - are hot to make one. I think that would be a great project for us, after all, I know a thing or two about papier mache projects. We're gonna do it! (Hopefully the dollar store will have some shell necklaces ...)

Nancy also sang a "disappearing" song - "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." You sing the first go through from start to finish (row, row, row ... life is but a dream), but the second go through you leave off a word (row, row, row ... life is but a), and with each subsequent pass through, one more word gets dropped. It was a good musical exercise.

She closed the show with a song that always brings the house down. In her intro she explained that it was written by a couple of guys from Whidbey Island, just north of Seattle and now it's known round the globe - "it" being "The Hokey Pokey." (This reminds me - one of my favorite bumper stickers is 'What if the Hokey Pokey IS what it's all about?')

Me being me, tonight I researched Hokey Pokey and can't find that local tie-in. ... Idaho was about as close as I could get.

TABLE TIME: We did something crazy this morning - math worksheets! (It's been awhile ...)

Fortunately, it was like riding a bike for the kids. CJ's math was a two-page spread mixing two-column (tens) addition and subtraction. He didn't confuse a single operator (+ or - sign), and all his math was good. In listening to him do the work, I though it interesting that when he was adding or subtracting the 10s column, he'd say 70 minus 30 instead of 7 minus 3.

SOLAR POWERED: I had the washing machine lugging away before 7 this morning, but rather than transfer the wet clothes over to the dryer, I deposited a huge bag at the kids' feet. I asked them why they though I was choosing not to use the dryer today.

After about 4 or 5 wrong guesses (the dryer's broken, etc.), Annabelle conjectured it was because we were going to dry them with the sun and save electricity. Bingo!

I showed the kids the right way to hang/drape the clothes so that they dried the quickest. (Life skills lesson for the day.)

STORY TIME: We revisited an old favorite today - Scholastic's Story Starter Web page.

The kids each took a spin and wrote about what the 'machine' spit out for them. CJ was instructed to draw a picture and write a caption about a quick pig that climbs tall trees. And that's what he did.

Annabelle was tasked with writing about a skunk who loves broccoli.

I love her picture. :)

STICKY SITUATION: While using one's hands and head is often how to get things done, this evening, Annabelle learned that using your feet is sometimes in order too. Here, she's helping Christian stick down some super groovy retro boomerang laminate. It has been in our basement for over a year - way too long.

Blue Skies

BLUFFING: Today dawned with beautiful blue skies and we were all itching to get out in it. We decided to head west a mile or so, to Magnolia Bluff, and bike/jog along the sidewalk there.

As we rode/ran, I suggested to CJ to try to pick out as many different kinds of vessels as he could on the Sound. We saw sailboats, a barge, a tug boat, ferries, and container ships - a pretty good assortment.

At one point we stopped to allow Annabelle to catch up and CJ cracked me up by reading this manhole cover as "Dr. Ain." (And yes, he knew it was supposed to say "drain," he was just having some fun.)
There are several spots along the bluff with rolling swaths of grass and park benches. One urban oasis had thousands of wildflowers. Annabelle was thrilled by the fact that most of them were some shade of pink.

As we were in the homestrech, I noticed a container ship out on the sound, motoring its way to the port. I suggested CJ try to race it to the parking lot. We won. :) (I'm no gazelle, but I'm glad to know that at my advanced age, I'm still faster than a heavily loaded container ship.)
And here, for your viewing pleasure, is Kirby looking ridiculous in her pink racing harness. Guess whose idea/insistence it was to buy a pink one?

MONSTER MATINEE: At lunchtime I turned on the TV in hopes of finding something "On Demand" that was educational and entertaining for the kids to watch.

Um, we wound up watching a "Godzilla" cartoon.

Oh how I loved watching "Godzilla" movies when I was a kid - every Saturday on KATU's "Monster Matinee."

This 2010 version was nothing like those. First of all, Godzilla didn't look all that much like a dinosaur, which is a real problem. And I won't even waste your time commenting on the cast of characters and the 'plot.'

The kids were interested in it for all of two minutes.

PENCIL PUSHER: This afternoon Neighbor Bob caught Christian in the alley and gave him this small black roll of fabric. Christian brought it in the house, unfurled it and whoa! It was about a million (give or take) pencils of all kids of designs/colors.

Apparently it was, once upon a time, some pencil salesman's kit, which he would unfurl and impress clients with, showing the vast array of different types of pencils they could have imprinted with their names.

It will be a long, long time before the MPA student body has to go scrounging around for a pencil!

THE HEAT IS ON: It's supposed to get to the mid 90s later this week. We didn't wait for the scorching temperatures to drag the Slip-n-Slide out for its inaugural run this summer. CJ was reminded on his first trip down the plastic alley that he has a scrape on his knee. Ouch!

Other than that, it was all good times!

ASTRAL ART: Our friends at NASA have announced the winners of the 2010 Life and Work on the Moon Art and Design Contest. The contest included everything from lunar and Martian architecture to original music to poetry short stories, paintings, freehand drawings, and more. Here's a clip of the overall winner's work. It's an animation called "Moon Shot" by Dalton Mills, a high school student in Wisconsin. Impressive!

TIED UP IN KNOTTS: I did something tonight we rarely do. I put the kids to bed with a movie. My rationale was that we have a stack of DVDs that are due back to the library that I've already renewed a couple of times. It's now or never time.

So what's their bedtime story? "The Incredible Mr. Limpett" (1964) starring Don Knotts as a wimpy guy (duh) that can't get into the military to help WWII, so in an incredible turn of events, he turns into a fish. It's really, really weird and for whatever reason, I recall really liking it when I was a kid.

CeeJ and Bee are well over an hour into it as I type and they are very into it. In fact, CJ has bolted his bed a few times because the suspense has been too much for him (including one point where he was afraid Mr. Limpet was going to be a fish out of water). We'll see if the movie is compelling enough to keep 'em awake until the very end. (BTW, apparently there is a new version of the movie in the works. ...)

Fifth of July

FIREWORKS REWIND: I know, I know, the Fourth of July is over, but its memory lingers in our house.
Our Fourth festivities included a bit of campus decoration (hung the flag outside, strung up some star garland and applied some window clings, which Annabelle and CJ decided to apply backward, so passersby and those over on Queen Anne hill could enjoy them. The kids also each made a pan of red white and blue crispy rice treats.

Last night we crossed the Interbay valley and went to the east side of Queen Anne hill to view the fireworks being set off from a barge in Lake Union. Actually, we secured our fireworks show spot on the evening of July 3, when we went and parked our truck over on tony 5th Avenue at Boston, which is an optimal viewing spot.
At about 8 p.m. on the Fourth we headed to QA hill, parked in front of Rick's house, and walked about 5 blocks to the truck. There, we comfortably camped out for a couple of hours. (Many a passerby remarked on our ingenious spot saving technique!)
The kids played with a friend they made (Joey, from Nashville - cute kid, age 10 but CJ's size, with an amazing head of shoulder-length hair that naturally formed huge ringlets). The time passed quickly, and by the time 10 p.m. rolled around, probably 300 were packed in elbow to elbow in the intersection we'd staked out.
During the display, Annabelle asked, "How are fireworks made?"

Flash forward to July 5. ...

PYRO PROS: This morning, we all learned a lot more about how fireworks are made. For starters, we went on a (long) virtual factory tour of the Zambelli Fireworks Internationale in Western Pennsylvania. Their family has been in the fireworks biz since Antonio Zambelli ventured from Italy in 1893 to establish the Zambelli Fireworks Manufacturing Company in New Castle Pennsylvania. (The little black book he brought along with him containing secret family "recipes" is locked in a safe at the Zambelli HQ.)

Next, we watched a Discovery Science video about fireworks, mostly centering on "Thunder Over Louisville," which is held each spring at the Kentucky Derby Festival. It's a Zambelli production, launched with ten computers, eight barges and a waterfall of fire along a 3,200 foot bridge. The footage we saw online was a-freaking-mazing.

BEST FOR LAST: To round out the fireworks video viewing session, I pointed our browser to a "Mythbusters" episode. It was billed as "Mythbusters visit Zambelli Fireworks," so I thought we'd be seeing more factory/shell making type footage. Not quite!

Instead, the Mythbusters were just getting some explosives advice from the Zambelli folks in order to construct a hwacha - an ancient Korean weapon that shoots hundreds of arrows hundreds of feet at the same time.

The Mythbusters were trying to rocket 200 4.5-foot arrows 500 yards (wow!). The kids were very interested in the trial-and-error process of the Mythbusters as they experimented with different amounts of fire power and trajectories (ballistics and range). It was a highly entertaining experiment - the kids were bouncing up and down in their chairs when it came time for the final test. (The graphic at the right is a 1500s painting of a hwacha design.)

Of course after watching all this, the kids wanted to go blow stuff up. :) Fortunately, we had a couple of boxes of popits leftover from the Fourth. ...
TARGET PRACTICE: I thought we could kind of copy the Mythbusters' theme, by aiming our explosives at a target. So, I drew a bullseye in the alley. I told the kids the center was worth 50, the middle ring = 10 points and the outer ring = 5.
Once CJ knew the activity involved racking up points, he was all over it. :) Honestly, I had no idea CJ was so proficient at counting by 50s. He kept an accurate score in his head and by himself. His only little hiccough was when he scored another 50 points after reaching 950. I immediately wondered if he knew the next bump up would be 1,000. And, in a way he did - but he called it 10 hundred. A bit unorthodox, but correct - and interesting. :)

STRAWBERRY SEASON: We have been spending a LOT of time outside these past few days, which is a good thing, but along with good things sometimes come bad things. Sometimes bad things come in the form of scrapes. Annabelle's sporting a big one on her elbow and CJ acquired a fresh one on his knee tonight.

It's funny, CJ is rarely gets hurt and when he does, he's really bad at it. ;) He knows he's supposed to cry/be upset, but it doesn't come naturally to him, so, for instance, he might actually say (in a steady voice), "Boo hoo." Correct - and interesting. :)