Gold Fever

GOLD NUGGETS: Until last night, I had no idea that there was a National Park in the middle of Seattle's Skid Row, er, I mean Pioneer Square, district.

A few days ago, I saw a notice of a field trip to the Klondike Gold museum through the Shoreline school the kids attend a couple days a week. CJ, especially, has been so into metals and mining lately, when I saw the outing offered, I didn't hesitate to sign up.

The tiny National Park location is on the corner of Second and Jackson in the historic Hotel Cadillac building.

Our outing today started with a 15-minute movie about the Yukon Gold Rush that began in 1897. On the heels of a national depression, Seattle benefitted greatly by becoming an important stop on the way north for about 70 percent of all gold stampeders.

The movie was fascinating. It included dozens of photos from the gold rush, and though the inhabitants wore different clothing, it was easy to pick out the parts of town depicted in the video.

After the video the park ranger invited the group down to the basement of the museum to pan for gold. Naturally, the kids (20 or so) were all totally JAZZED about this. Problem was, only three kids out of the group got a chance to go through the motions. Why this was the case, who knows. By my count, there were at least four rangers (or at least if not rangers, they were adults with park badges on) manning the museum, and the place was completely dead except for our group. But after three junior prospectors, our tour guide cut the panning off, and went back to her post, sitting behind the desk with a couple of other people in the ghost town lobby. Not cool, in my book. I assured CJ and Annabelle they'd get their chance to pan gold on another day. (And we ended up dropping $$ in the NPS gift shop for a pan your own gold at home kit. Not to be a cynic, but maybe that's why the NPS guide for our group cut the panning short - to drive up gift shop sales.)

My sour grapes aside, the museum was very interesting and I'm glad we went. We learned that Seattle's work force grew from 3,500 in 1880 to over 237,000 by 1910 due to the gold rush in the Klondike. We also learned that very familiar names in modern day Seattle harken back to the gold rush era.

For instance, George Bartell came to Seattle at the age of 18 with only fifteen dollars in his pocket. In 1890, after working at the Lake Washington Pharmacy for only two weeks, he purchased it from its owner and Bartell Drugs was founded. Bartell drug stores are all over Seattle still today. Interestingly., though Bartell was doing well when stampeders were headed for the Yukon Territory, he couldn't resist the lure himself. He turned the pharmacy over to his assistant, and headed toward the Yukon Territory. Per the Bartell Drug Web site, "He returned to Seattle a year later with enough gold to pay for most of his trip expenses and a vision of Bartell Drugs' future."


And then there was John W. Nordstorm, who emigrated from Sweden to the U.S. at age of 16 with $5 to his name. He worked his way across the U.S. in railways, mines, lumber yards and shipyards, until he arrived in Seattle in 1896. Nordstrom made some good bank in the Klondike gold rush and invested it here in Seattle and the rest, as they say, is history.

Did you know: There is a thin layer of gold on an astronauts' visors to fend off dangerous effects solar radiation.

OH AND BY THE WAY: A week from now the Mars Science Laboratory will be blasting off from the Space Coast. And I'll be there to watch it go down!

Today I got my itinerary for the two days of the Tweetup. It Is Awesome.

Wednesday, Nov. 23/L-2: Tweetup Day 1

6:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. – Registration at the Kennedy Space Center Press Accreditation Badging Building; travel to the press site, set up, meet fellow participants
9:00 a.m. – Welcome by Trent Perrotto (@NASA) & Veronica McGregor (@NASAJPL)
9:05 a.m. – Meet the tweeps
10:30 a.m. – Break
11:00 a.m. – NASA TV starts http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-tweetup
11:05 a.m. – Jim Green, director, Planetary Science, NASA Headquarters
11:25 a.m. – Doug McCuistion, director, Mars Exploration program, NASA Headquarters
11:45 a.m. – Curiosity engineering: Allen Chen and Betina Pavri, systems engineers, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
12:00 p.m. – Ryan Bechtel, Department of Energy
12:15 p.m. – Curiosity science: Ashwin Vasavada, deputy project scientist, Mars Science Laboratory at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Pan Conrad, deputy principal investigator for Curiosity's SAM Instrument at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
12:30 p.m. -- Rex Engelhardt, mission manager, NASA's Launch Services Program (@NASA_LSP)
12:45 p.m. – Lunch break (opportunity to visit the NASA cafeteria, but it closes at 1 p.m.)
2:00 p.m. – Tour of NASA's Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, including a drive by historical launch pads and stops at Launch Complex 41 with a briefing from Mike Woolley of United Launch Alliance (@ULAlaunch), the Vehicle Assembly Building, and the Apollo Saturn V Center.
6:00 p.m. – Return to the press site

Friday, Nov. 25/Launch: Tweetup Day 2
7:00 a.m. – Badges get you in to Kennedy Space Center Press Site
7:15 a.m. – Group picture beside the countdown clock (NASA photographer Paul Alers, @NASAhqphoto)
Group 1:
7:30 -- Eyes on the Solar System (@NASA_Eyes) demo with Doug Ellison (@Doug_Ellison), JPL Visualization Producer in press briefing room
8:00 a.m. -- Expedition 25 Astronaut Doug Wheelock (@Astro_Wheels)
8:15 a.m. -- Bill Nye the Science Guy, (@thescienceguy)
Group 2:
7:30 a.m. -- Expedition 25 Astronaut Doug Wheelock (@Astro_Wheels)
7:45 a.m. -- Bill Nye the Science Guy, (@thescienceguy)
8:00 a.m. -- Eyes on the Solar System (@NASA_Eyes) demo with Doug Ellison (@Doug_Ellison), JPL Visualization Producer in press briefing room
8:30 a.m. -- Special guest TBA
8:45 a.m. -- Astronaut Leland Melvin, associate administrator for Education (@Astro_Flow)
10:25 a.m. – Launch window opens for Mars Curiosity rover
(window closes at 12:08 p.m.)
~1 p.m. – Post-launch news conference on NASA TV

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

Midweek

TO DYE FOR: Science class was lots of fun today. Continuing the textiles unit, last week the kids stained a swatch of fabric with dirt, paint, oil, mustard and other splotches. Today, they stained fabric again, but this time with a much more pleasing result.

First, they folded their fabric square and dipped it in three different colors (yellow, red and blue). They did that with three different squares, and each result was different, of course.

After that, they each got a cup and had different colored Sharpies they used to draw dots in a circle pattern. They used an eyedropper to apply alcohol to that and voila! It produced the colorful pattern you saw in the first picture above.

The kids in the class were all really pleased with how their experimenting turned out.

LISTENING IN: Before science class, we watched an ISS update. There are now six onboard there, three more joined the three already up there last night. Today, we got to see a live video conference call. It kind of felt like eavesdropping, because the astronauts and cosmonauts were talking to family members on Earth.

The kids loved it when one of the Russian children asked his dad about the Angry Bird stuffed animal he'd sent up in the Soyuz capsule with him. The cosmonaut assured his child that he was taking good care of it. :)

We also listened and watched a Congressional Gold Medal ceremony held this morning held in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington D.C. Honorees were Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. Here, Armstrong addresses the crowd.

Image Credit: NASA/Paul Alers

CJ and Annabelle were pretty impressed that these guys were getting medals. Usually, that's the type of stuff they read about in books, or see at the end of "Star Wars."

SLICE-SHAPED HIGHLIGHT: Today was the kids' favorite Wednesday of the month. It was "Pizza Wednesday" - the one day a month there is a pizza party in the library before their science class. While they dug in, I grabbed a book off the shelves for them to read. My eyes fell on "The Greedy Triangle." It was a cute (and educational) story about a shape who perpetually wanted "just" one more side and one more angle. He morphed from a triangle to a quadrilateral to a pentagon and up through a hexagon and beyond, never satisfied.

Eventually, however, he had a change of heart and decided that three sides and three corners was a perfect fit for him.

Right after they finished eating, the kids took an Accelerated Reader test on that book, as well as one we listened to on the way to class, "The Big Balloon Race." I was surprised at the end of the story when the author's notes informed us that it was based on one of America's most popular balloonists of the late 1800s, Mary Myers, who was better known as Carlotta the Lady Aeronaut. Apparently Mary/Carlotta made more ascensions in hydrogen balloons than any other aeronaut of her time. We'll definitely be checking into Carlotta's history a bit more, with non fiction sources this time!

TWEET! I get dozens of email from various branches of NASA a day about all sorts of interesting stuff. I got a BIG smile when one of them had the subject line that referenced me (and 149 other people). The subject said: "NASA Invites 150 Lucky Twitter Followers To Launch Of Mars Rover." A week from now, I will have finished my first day of the Tweetup, and will be looking forward to the rocket launch on the Friday a.m. after Thanksgiving.

Here's a link to the press release: http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2011/nov/HQ_11-387_Curiosity_Tweetup.html

Today, Annabelle helped on some of the cookies I am working on to take with me. After four failures, I FINALLY came up with a couple of designs I'm OK with.

GOING DOWN: I forgot to post these pics earlier in the week, on our way to the Museum of Flight. They show some of the demo of the Viaduct, which is a pretty Big Deal in these parts.

As we drove through, you could actually smell the concrete dust in the air.

Cool Whirled

image credit: NASA

HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU: Christian came across this photo today, and I just had to share it here. It's a self-portrait taken by NASA astronaut Mike Fossum. What you see is actually a picture of the the visor of his spacesuit's helmet. The curved surface shows a fish-eye reflection of Fossum's gloved hands and his camera, with the ISS and Earth in the background. It was taken on July 12 of this year, during a spacewalk.

Fossum is currently an ISS inhabitant, and he'll be getting some new company tonight, shortly after 9 p.m. our time, as that's when the three-man Expedition 29 crew that launched Sunday night from Kazhakstan is set to arrive. I wonder if they're going to take their Angry Bird on board ...

We watched the docking of Soyuz and the ISS with great interest. The kids both remarked how the (Russian) screen we were watching reminded them of the game they played yesterday at The Museum of Flight (where they had to spacewalk and capture the Hubble). The graphics were remarkably similar. In the photo above (a pic I took of my PC screen), you can see the capsule trying to line up with the ISS.

In other NASA news, here's the subject line from an email I received today. NASA Accepting Applications For Future Astronauts. Cool! In case you're wondering, minimum qualifications include "a bachelor's degree in engineering, science or math and three years of relevant professional experience. Successful applicants frequently have significant qualifications in engineering or science; or extensive experience flying high-performance jet aircraft. Educators teaching kindergarten through 12th grade with these minimimum degree requirements also are encouraged to apply."



SPIN CYCLE: Doing laundry as homework?! Sure enough, that was the kids' assignment from their science class this week. In science they're studying textiles, and this was a continuation of the lab they started last week in class, where they purposely stained a fabric swatch and then used various means/methods to try to get the stains out.

The homework was to do a load of laundry at home and notice before and after differences. We decided to use the kids' laundry basket as our test case. Out of it, we extracted a stained turtleneck of Annabelle's. I pointed out to the kids that plenty of other articles of clothing were, no doubt, likewise stained, but that the white shirt showed the spots the worst.

I suggested the kids might want to try to "Shout it out" when it came to the white shirt. They have no pop culture tie in to that phrase, so they took turns - one would squirt the Shout while the other screamed at the top of their lungs. Good times.  

Next, we took the laundry down to the basement, where the kids stuffed the washer full. We fired it up and they watched it whirl around for a bit. And yes, I know, we mixed our whites and colors ...

Sorry if the suspense is killing you, but we didn't yet check to see if the Shout worked on the chocolate stain. Stay tuned for further developments!

ROLLERGIRL: We spent just a few minutes playing around in the alley today. Annabelle decided to give her skateboard a go. She was tentative at best. Baby steps. ...

MORNING MEETING: We started our day off with a wonderful hour hosted by rockstar astrophysicist and Hayden Planetarium Director Neil deGrasse Tyson broadcast live from the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). His guests were NASA astronauts Mike Massimino and John Grunsfeld, both of whom were crew members on STS-125 and worked on Hubble Space Telescope repairs. AMNH curator Michael Shara was also on hand to answer questions about the museum's new exhibition Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration.

It was a fast, fun hour. The group fielded questions from students on hand as well as the "Twittersphere" as deGrasse Tyson called it. We didn't submit any questions, but loved hearing all about everything from space walks to to doing the Moon Walk in space.

Afterward, Annabelle said, "I learned a lot of interesting stuff about space. I definitely did not know they wore Huggies pull up diapers under their space underpants (during a spacewalk)."


CJ said, "I like (learning about) how they train - by going in the desert or maybe going in a big pool of water to simulate space. Thanks for letting me listen to it mom." :) 
 
BANNER DAY: We've been counting down the days until the release of "Diary of a Wimpy Kid 6: Cabin Fever." The series is far and away CJ's favorite thing to read.
 
Well, today was that day, and we scored a copy of the book at our neighborhood grocery store, of all places. I love these "Diary of .... " books (because the kids love them so), and wish a new one came out every day, not just one a year or so.
 
Annabelle read the entire book during CJ's 90 minute acting class. He started it before his class and finished it tonight before bedtime.
 

After he finished, CJ declared, "It's a good book. In fact, I think it's the best one yet." He quickly recanted this, however, saying "all of them are the same good."

Image Credit: NASA/Carla Cioffi



SNOWY SEND OFF: Sunday night, the kids and I gathered 'round the computer to watch NASA TV in high def. On the evening's schedule was the launch of a Expedition 29, a Soyuz TMA-22 rocket headed to the International Space Station.

The scene at the launch pad, the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, was unlike anything we've ever seen before. It was practically a white out, with snow blanketing the ground and swirling all around. And speaking of blanketing, the three space travelers - NASA astronaut  Dan Burbank, with cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin, had what appeared to be Snuggies over their flight suits on the way to the capsule.


The launch went off on schedule, without incident. We watched the whole 15 or so minutes it took the astronauts reach orbit. It was easy to tell when they'd reached orbit - the Angry Bird stuffed animal that was hanging in their capsule suddenly started floating around. The kids loved that. :)


WINGING IT: The number one item on today's To Do list was visiting The Museum of Flight to pick up
some swag to take to my fellow Tweeps at the Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity) Tweetup and launch next week. (Eep! NEXT WEEK!)

We would up spending nearly three hours at the museum. How I love, Love, LOVE that place. It's just beautiful and magical and a must see if you're in Seattle.  

CJ likes to see the displays in order, so we started in the World War I exhibit. There, we marveled over the amazing old aircraft and the artifacts from the era. The kids love the interactive displays, where they get to turn knobs, press buttons and such. 

 

 Next, it was the World War II exhibit.

  

CJ has been asking lots of questions about Hitler for the past few weeks, so there, he was able to read and see lots about the terrible dictator.

There are many spots throughout the museum where you can sit down and watch a short movie. At the back of the WWII exhibit, a black and white film was playing in a small theater. The part we saw was mainly footage about the U.S. dropping atomic bombs on Japan, and the awful suffering and human toll in Europe at the hands of the Nazis.The film ended saying it was impossible to know how many died in World War II, but that an estimate was 56 million people (elsewhere I've seen estimates nearing 80 million). It's pretty much impossible to wrap your mind around that number. 

As we left the small, dark theater and stood amidst the war planes, uniforms and photos of soldiers, I found myself feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all. And while I was fighting to keep my composure, all of the sudden CJ just busted out bawling, poor guy.

He kept giving himself a pep talk, saying, "I'm going to be cool," but it didn't work too well, poor guy. A chocolate old fashioned donut from the on site restaurant helped some.

After regrouping, we moved onto the more modern machines, including space age stuff. Here's a model of the little orb that started the space race. 

In the space age exhibit, there was a looping video of television from the infancy of the era. The kids enjoyed watching a snippet of "The Banana Splits" and a Quisp commercial. 

Christian, CJ and Annabelle all tried their hand at rescuing the Hubble telescope. CJ and Annabelle didn't quite accomplish it, but you'll be happy to know that Christian saved the day, and the telescope.

Today we discovered a corner of the museum we'd somehow missed on previous visits. It's a section that's especially for the younger set.

 CJ and Annabelle loved it, of course.

There were lots of hands-on opportunities to learn more about the principles of flight and flying a plane.

We also made our way up to the tower exhibit for the first time. The level has an array of informative displays.

The view for the tower was phenomenal. CJ enjoyed pretending he was an air traffic controller.

Our art lesson of the day came at the legendary Beth's Cafe. Outside, we appreciated the colorful wall mural in their parking lot.

Inside, we marveled over the hundreds of crayon drawings covering every wall in the place. 

We also marveled over the vast quantity of food that came on every plate. Yikes.