Simple Stuff

WEEDS: We started our morning getting down and dirty. Specifically, we went to the top of the lot to the "beauty strip" by the road to pull weeds.

Truth be told, I pulled 100 percent of the weeds, but the kids were great about scooping up the offenders and throwing them onto the compost pile, which was great. When they weren't on compost duty, the kids were playing in the yard, which is a good thing.

CAPTIVATING CAPSULE: I was happy to get a NASA email today that let us know tat construction on the first space-bound Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Module began with the first weld at the Michoud Assembly Facility. This capsule will be used during Orion's first test flight in space. After welding is completed at Michoud, the Orion spacecraft orbital test article will be shipped to NASA's Kennedy Space Center, where the heat shield will be installed. At Kennedy, it will undergo final assembly and checkout operations for eventual flight. While this sounds all well and good, a friend of mine who is definitely in the know brought up a good point. Upon what rocket will this capsule be flown? Hmm - good question. What good is a capsule without a rocket to power it up, up and away?
AUDREY 2?: Not sure if it was a Twitter or Facebook lead today, but somehow I became aware of an investigation taking place in space and on Earth called "Plants in Space." The investigation will examine plant root growth in microgravity. Classrooms (that's us!) here on Earth can grow ground-based control plants in your classroom, download hourly photographs from the International Space Station, and design experiments based on the data from space. Cool! The live experiments begin on September 19, 2011. Naturally, I signed us up. That said, I have a sinking feeling the ISS is going to be demanned by NASA astronauts soon, and I worry about them abandoning it altogether. ...

Oh, and in case you are wondering WTH? about the Audrey 2 subheading, it's a Little Shop of Horrors reference.

FOX IN THE MOON?: In keeping with our space-y theme today, we read "Moon Rope." It's a Peruvian folk tale about a fox who wants to visit the moon. He talks his friend mole into going along. They make a long rope out of grass and have some bird friends fly it up and hook it to the tail of the crescent moon. While climbing, mole slips all the way back down to Earth. He's so embarrassed that he lives almost entirely underground for the rest of his life, and only comes out at night. Fox makes it all the way up, and that's why you see a face in the moon. (Funny, we always thought it was the man in the moon, not a fox.)

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.

Not Back to School Day

WE'RE NOT NORMAL: Today, the kids and I reverted back to our clearly-not-normal existence. For, you see, Seattle Public Schools started today. That means that parks, stores, restaurants, everywhere are basically devoid of kidlings from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. That makes people Notice us and ask questions. (Just take a look at the photo above. CJ had the fountains to himself in Ballard today. On sunny, non-school days, the place is always packed.)

Knowing this, as we struck out on our day's errands, I warned the kids, "People are probably going to ask you why you aren't in school today" and we talked about short and sweet responses. Annabelle said, "We can just tell them we're homeschooled." I told her that's mostly true (although they take lots of classes elsewhere), but it's really not necessary to tell strangers in the store that, it's none of their business and usually just leads to more questions that are none of their business either. ;) "Our school doesn't start until the 20th" which is true, as that's when classes at their Shoreline school begin.

To celebrate our own special brand of freedom, I took the kids to a new frozen yogurt shop in the Fremont neighborhood, Cool Whirled. Fun place! The kids got to choose their flavor(s) of soft serve yogurt (they each got some chocolate and vanilla), and then it was time to choose from toppings galore. M&Ms, Oreos, cookie dough, Cocoa Puffs, animal crackers, chocolate chips and I forget what else made it into their mix. (I know it sounds gawd awful and like a ridiculous amount of food, but they only had less than a teaspoonful of each of those toppings and just a few ounces of yogurt, so it wasn't as obscene as it sounds.)

CJ really enjoyed his creation.Annabelle was just slightly less enthused, and in animated detail, compared and contrasted it to another frozen yogurt shop she has frequented.TWEEPS: This afternoon, the kids and I tuned into a streaming Internet broadcast of the NASA Tweetup for the GRAIL mission, which launches tomorrow morning, early.

GRAIL is a acronym for Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory. A 12-story Delta 2 rocket will be used to launch twin spacecraft which will orbit the Moon in tandem. They will measure its gravitational field in unprecedented detail and by doing so, hopefully answer key questions about the Moon's internal structure and give scientists a better understanding of how our solar system formed. GRAIL has two windows for launch attempts on Sept. 8 - 5:37:06 a.m. and 6:16:12 a.m. Pacific time. The kids both asked me to wake them so they could watch. :)

I'm so glad we tuned into the Tweetup. By doing so, we got to learn about the super cool GRAIL MoonKam project via which classrooms will be allowed to request pictures of the lunar surface from cameras on the twin satellites. One of the Tweetup participants asked if the program would be open to private schools and homeschoolers and the answer was yes, so you know I, of course I registered Magnolia Prep. The MoonKAM education and public outreach program is led by Dr. Sally Ride, America's first woman in space, and her team at Sally Ride Science in collaboration with undergraduate students at the University of California San Diego.

My absolute favorite part of the Tweetup was the appearance by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. I swear, he's part rock star, part Bill Cosby and just pure genius. deGrasse Tyson spent a lot of time talking about perceptions and it was fascinating. For instance, he said there aren't optical illusions, rather those are instances of "a brain failure. It's a failure of your sensory system to know what you're looking at." He also talked about how people in Australia "don't know they're upside down" because of Earth's gravity and their perceptions.

deGrasse Tyson sounds excited about GRAIL, noting that technology measuring the gravity vectors on the moon will let us "know what's going on down in the center. It's a machine beyond our senses," that will decode secrets of the moon and "bring it to us on a silver platter."

DeGrasse Tyson likened the Tweetup to a field trip for adults, and remarked how field trips are some of the few educational experiences students tend to remember into adulthood. He characterized scientists as people "who never grew up," as they continue to explore and ask questions. He also observed that for the first two years of life we teach children how to walk and talk "and for the rest of their life we're telling them to shut up and sit down." Ouch.

Spaceflight Now has a nice GRAIL page if you want more info: http://www.spaceflightnow.com/delta/d356/status.html

MO' MATH: We opened our math books today - about time, might I add. Today's exercise was subtracting dollars and cents. The kids both did well, tho Bee took about four times longer than CJ. Part of that is because it just comes easier to him. The other part of it is this ... HERE FISHY FISHY: One of our stops this afternoon was Swanson's, a super nice nursery just north of Ballard. We were hoping to find a little something for Bee's ballet teacher, as there was a going away reception for her tonight.

While at Swanson's we stopped by the urban chicken coop (those were some big birds!) and the fabulous koi ponds. No lie, their fish probably weigh more than our dog. And they act like they're STARVING and pretty much come out of the water at you, hoping you have food.LOST AND FOUND: The last stop on our errand-go-round today was the Ballard park pictured at the top of today's entry. When we got home, as I crossed our threshold, I noticed I didn't have my small camera bag in hand. I immediately assumed I left it in the car, and decided to let it hang out there until we went to the ballet going away party this evening.

Imagine my surprise when we got to the car this evening and my camera bag wasn't there. "Ruh-roh!" as Scooby-Doo would say.

Despite it not being in the car, I didn't panic. It just didn't *feel* lost to me. I was sure it was in the house or car somewhere. So after getting back from the ballet goodbye, we all looked high and low and *gasp* no camera bag. Well crap.

I knew I had the camera at the park, as I took pics of the kids there, and we didn't stop anywhere else between here and there, so the most obvious (and awful) conclusion was that I somehow managed to leave my camera bag at the park. I thought this a) impossible and b) even if it happened, no way 4 hours later it would still be there, of course. We're talking a busy, city park with a pretty good sized homeless population. Nonetheless, I felt I HAD to drive over there. And so I did. In rush hour traffic. As I pulled up to the park, I craned my neck toward the stone I had been sitting on. And what did I see? My camera bag, laying there. Incredible! I lucked into a parking spot, popped out of the car, grabbed it and drove home. I felt so lucky, I thought about stopping to buy a lottery ticket. I also wondered if perhaps it was karma coming 'round, as just a few days ago, CJ found a really pretty ring with three huge, diamond looking rocks on it. He found it on the floor by the shopping carts at the grocery store. If it was a diamond ring it was worth thousands of dollars. If it was costume jewelry, it was worth a small fraction of that, but it was a nice, fitted ring and might have meant something very special to the wearer. Whatever the case, we took it to customer service where it was (hopefully) locked in the safe at their store.

What comes around, goes around.

WIDE OPEN SPACES: Annabelle, flossing what's left of her teeth ...

What a Weekend

COMPANY: We had a visitor this weekend. A longtime friend (hi Glenn!) who came to Seattle to spend Labor Day weekend with us. He got here Saturday afternoon and CJ nd Annabelle were so happy to have a fresh audience to try their material on. :)

BUMBERSHOOT!; On Monday, we spent 10 glorious hours at Seattle Center for the Bumbershoot festival under sunny skies with the mercury at 80 degrees - perfect.

Our first stop was in Youngershoot headquarters. There, the kids completed some puzzles sponsored by Pacific Science Center.

The kids also explored an on-site garden (ours at home is better!) and Annabelle practiced hula hooping. She was surpringly good at it!

From the kids' zone we made our way to the center food court. There, the kids scored some lunch and we headed to the basement for a play, "When the Mountain Meets the Moon" presented by the Book-It Reperatory Theatre. The play is based on the Newberry award winning book by Grace Lin of the same name. It featured three hard working actors playing multiple parts. It was 45-minutes long and dialogue heavy, but the kids' attention was held, which is good. There are so many performances to choose from at Bumbershoot it's hard to know what to pick, but we were happy to spend an hour at this activity.

From there, we headed over to something completely different- a concert featuring Big Boi, founder of Outkast. I didn't notice other families with their children streaming in (the show most certainly wasn't on the "Youngershoot" schedule). But oh well, Christian and I have had many talks with the kids about word choice/language and what is appropriate when and where and what's not, and I was pretty sure having the kids see 15 minutes of the show wouldn't ruin their lives. Turns out I was right. The thumpin' bass was shaking our chests from the concourse. :) I will admit, I do love me some bass. When we got into the arena the smell of pot was, shall we say, evident and as we entered the arena, Big Boi was exhorting the Seattle crowd to get their "mother f*&%ing hands in the air!" Being the obedient children they are, CJ and Annabelle started fist pumping. :) Christian and I just laughed. The kids liked the bass and the light show and honestly, most of the words were undecipherable. We stayed for about 4 songs, but left, because we knew that beyond the smoke-filled arena, the sunny Labor Day skies were calling our names.

After Big Boi, the kids and I bounced between the great Seattle Center fountains while Christian and Friend (hi Glenn!) found a beer garden. After awhile, we all (including Rick & Ken) met up in the line at Key Arena for the Fitz & the Tantrums and Hall & Oates shows.

We had to stand in a cattle chute line for about 40 minutes before sprinting into Key Arena (ah, like the bad ol days - festival seating) for seats for the show. And once we'd secured seats, we had to wait over an hour for Fitz & Friends. Fortunately, I'd packed along magazines for the kids, and OMG, there was no shortage of people watching. Before we knew it, it was time for the show and oh, what a show it was. Fitz & the Tantrums is an AWESOME show band - high energy and embodies everything that was good (and that's not much) about '80s music. Definitely a cut above the rest. They're also rockin' soul - right in the pocket with Hall & Oates music.

The night's headliner was Hall & Oates and that was pure pleasure from start to finish. They played every single hit you could hope for and then some. To a man, they were as tight/skilled as any band I've ever seen live. For a flavor of our concert experience, I'd encourage you to watch Fitz & the Tantrums' appearance on Daryl Hall's "Live From Daryl's House." Good, good stuff! CJ & Annabelle enjoyed Fitz & the Tantrums big time. Unfortunately, CeeJ and Bee slept through most of H&O.

SUPER TUESDAY: Summer isn't going without a fight and after our company left today ('bye Glenn!), we knew we needed to get back out into the sun. We decided to head down to West Seattle for some fun in the sand and surf. From our spot on Alki Beach, we could look straight across Elliott Bay to where we usually hang out on a close to home beach trip. The kids had all kids of fun at the beach, checking out sea creatures (jellyfish to Dall's porpoises) and building sea forts using driftwood.