Failure to Launch

image credit: NASA/ULA
NO GO: We were up before the sun this morning, excited about the launch of GRAIL. However, weather first pushed back and then scuttled the day's launch. Big bummer. They were going to try Friday, but as I sit here typing Thursday p.m., it's already been announced that the next attempt won't be until Saturday morning, 5:30 a.m. something our time. No sleeping in this Saturday!

TRUE CONFESSION: CJ was walking around the house this morning singing, "Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never going to run around and desert you," which is known to most of the world as the "Rick rolled song," by Rick Astley.

"I have that song stuck in my head," CJ said to me. I said something of a commiseratory nature. At that, he said, "Personally, I think that song is so good." When I laughed, he said, "No, seriously." And he was quite serious! Oh my.

CHEAPSKATE: I spent a portion of the morning snatching up too-good-to-pass-up deals. For starters, Google Offers had a Fandango movie deal for just $4 a ticket. Heck, I haven't seen those prices at a theater since I saw "Paper Moon" in the '70s! Sweet! I snatched two up pronto. Good thing I did, by the time Kennedy got here to babysit a little after 9 a.m., they were sold out.

I also scored up a couple of free admission passes thanks to Smithsonian magazine's annual Museum Day event. There are hundreds of participating museums around the nation, including several in our neck of the woods. I am ashamed to admit we have yet to make it down to the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field, so I opted for tickets for there. Within 30 seconds of hitting submit, I had an email with our two free tickets in it. Sweet! (You can read more here:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/museumday/#ixzz1XNDZZdx2 and just FYI, when you're searching for a museum near you, do your search more than one way, for instance do a by state search and do a by name search. For whatever reason, when I used their 'find a location' feature, it didn't turn up the Museum of Flight for me, but when I searched for that museum by keyword, it did.)

In other great deal news, by using a special code at checkout, I was able to buy four $25 certificates on Restaurant.com to one of our favorite restaurants, Hattie's Hat, in Ballard for just $2 apiece. That's $8 for $100 worth of really good dive bar food. :) (If you haven't checked out Restaurant.com, you should. It's an OK deal anytime, but if you wait until they have one of their 80 percent off sales, it's a STELLAR deal. Sign up to get their emails notifying you of specials, that's the way to go.

THE FUR IS FLYING: When we were at Bumbershoot this past weekend, Annabelle fell in love with a hat she saw someone wearing. I told her I thought the hat was cute, but didn't feel like paying $30 or however much it was for it. And I told her I thought we could make one for a lot less, and customize it to her specs. So yesterday, we went to the fabric store and she picked out some fur and lining. Today, started construction of the hat. The first step was finding a hooded something she has now that fits her well and taking some measurements from that. After that, we sketched out a rough pattern, and then we taped the pattern together so we could do a rough fit.

It seemed like it would work well enough, so we pinned the pattern to the fabric, traced the pattern's outline, and cut on the lines. Then, it was upstairs to the sewing machine. I manned the needle/fabric part, while Annabelle's foot controlled the pedal. We got the hood's outside and lining both sewn, and a pair of ears constructed and sewn on. Now we have to add the scarf/arm mitten thingees. They're not pictured on the prototype hat photo above, but at Bumbershoot we also saw hats that had built in scarves with paws on the end. Naturally, Annabelle wants that. Hopefully tomorrow we'll get the project finished up.

BUILDING BLOCKS: While Bee and I were sewing, I challenged CJ to try to build something with some blocks. He wanted to build an elevator, but it kept collapsing and he was getting really frustrated. So, it turned into a talk about engineering, experimenting, trial and error, and how you deal with the error part. I asked him if he thought the people who designed the space shuttles did it in a day, and that everything was perfect the first time. He said, "No." And then I asked him if he thought they should have just quit because it was hard and didn't go the way they wanted it to. He said "no" again. And then he continued building, modifying his approach, and finally came up with a few different structures that he was OK with.