Mishmash

ODDS & ENDS: Today's entry is a collection of past, present and future. Let's start with day before yesterday, as I still haven't managed to post all of the photos I wanted to from our Tacoma trip on Monday. For starters, in the Kids' Zone at Point Defiance Zoo, we encountered a drinking fountain. Thirsty, the four of us circled it looking for the button, dial, or ??? to make the water flow but we couldn't find it. Christian and I gave up but about a minute later CJ announced he'd discovered how to make it work. The button was a few feet away, tucked into a corner of a rock wall. Super cool, and good on CeeJ for figuring it out! Also in the Kids' Zone, the kids got a chance to feed some goats. As soon as the goats saw us getting quarters out to feed into their goat chow vending machine, they started getting super aggressive, darn near crawling out of their enclosure. DOWNTOWN: After the zoo, we drove through old town Tacoma. There, we saw the old, awesome Union Station building. We also walked across a sky bridge from Pacific Avenue to the Dale Chihuly museum. This was overhead ...And what was just down the block? The awesome Dorky's arcade!!!!REALLY RANDOM: As I was looking at the "temporary" folder I download my photos to each day, I spied the one above, taken probably a couple of weeks ago. In case you can't tell, it's a Wii-playing mouse mouse.
My wireless computer mouse died and I knew better than to throw it away. I knew Annabelle would want to make something out of it. Sure 'nuff, she made a mouse.

DEEP SPACE: NASA made a maybe big announcement today. The agency has selected the design of a new Space Launch System that will take NASA astronauts (yes, there are still NASA astronauts) farther into space than ever before. The press release today touted it as "the cornerstone for America's future human space exploration efforts." That sounds awesome. Ideas are great. Now, one question. Is the funding in place to make it happen?

Here is an artist's concept of what the SLS will look like on the launchpad.Image credit: NASA, of course.

According to NASA, "The SLS will be designed to carry the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, as well as important cargo, equipment and science experiments to Earth's orbit and destinations beyond. Additionally, the SLS will serve as a back up for commercial and international partner transportation services to the International Space Station."

Wouldn't it be awesome if NASA once again became the pioneer "to boldly go where no man (or woman) has gone before"? While I'll be eternally hopeful this happens, I am not optimistic here and now. I'd love to be wrong.

SIGNED ON THE DOTTED LINE: Today I dropped a registration form in the mail. It's for CJ to participate in a session of Theater of Possibility (TOP). I first learned about it a couple of years ago, but he wasn't old enough to participate at the time. A link in a recent homeschool group email reminded me about TOP. CJ has said more than a couple of times that he's interested in acting or directing. He and Christian took a couple hour long physical comedy class at Seattle Children's Theatre many months ago, and CJ loved it, but I haven't been quite ready to turn him loose in a more than an afternoon commitment class -until rediscovering TOP.

The program looks awesome on "paper" (my computer screen). The director's credentials are amazing. Hopefully, CJ will start the class the first week of October. Now, if we could just find Annabelle a new place to do her dance classes. ...