Thursday Before Thanksgiving

Image Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/DLR/ASU

This tie-dyed looking moon is an image just released by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter science team. It's the highest resolution topographic map of the moon ever created - and very colorful. :) It reminded me of the tie-dyeing the kids were doing yesterday.

Speaking of tie-dyeing, we were in a store today (Wal-Mart - there, I've said it) that we don't go to very often. In the craft section, the kids spied a kit to tie-dye shirts. They were so enthusiastic about it (fueled by the textiles unit they're working on in science class), I caved and bought it. So sometime this weekend we'll be staining our hands - and a couple of white t-shirts.

BRICK BY BRICK: The kids started new projects in LEGO class today. Annabelle's working on an earth mover.

CJ's working on some sort of motor vehicle. Both of those builds will have to wait, as there's no class next week due to Thanksgiving break.

BOOKISH: We worked our way through a couple of classic books today, including a Harry the Dog story and an Amelia Bedelia book. I thought the kids might not like the latter one because it's a bit dated (from 1966, which makes me EVEN MORE dated). Surprisingly to me, they thought "Amelia Bedelia and the Surprise Shower" was HYSTERICAL. The book was about a baby shower being thrown and centered on a series of misunderstandings about words, as Amelia always takes figures of speech literally and confuses terminology. For instance, when she was instructed to "scale and ice the fish," Amelia Bedelia weighed it and frosted it (ick!). And pruning the hedges involved hanging fruit off them, of course. And you can imagine what happened when it was shower time. ...

DANCE PARTY: What were you doing at 9:30 this morning? Bet you weren't twirling and prancing around the room waving colorful scarves, whilst singing and squealing with delight. That's what CJ and Annabelle were doing when I peeked in to watch their music class.

You know, I can't help but ponder how different things might be if adults took a few minutes each morning to do something similar.

BIG 'UN: We followed this load for awhile on I-5 today. MAN was that middle tree trunk huge. MUCH bigger than the average log we see going down the road. I would have loved to try to count its rings - too bad the stump was so muddy.

FIRST THING: Before 6 a.m. today, CJ was talking about bacteria and cloning and our Earth's earliest life forms. It was a pretty one sided conversation, I'll admit, because I hadn't even had any coffee yet.

I did rally to share with him later today news of the belief that LIQUID water, about the size of America's Great Lakes combined, is under and potentially mixing with the icy surface of Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. The fact that it's liquid - as opposed to frozen - is a Really Big Deal when it comes to the potentiality of some kind of lifeform(s) being there.

The University of Texas at Austin has a great Web page with info on the findings, including this neat-o representation of Eurpoa's "Great Lake."

Credit: Britney Schmidt/Dead Pixel VFX/Univ. of Texas at Austin