Let the Games Begin!

WE'RE NUMBER ONE!: In the wee small hours of Tuesday morning as most of Seattle slumbered, our favorite baseball team opened their 2012 season across the Pacific in Japan. And they won!

And do you realize the ENORMOUS implication of that win? ... That's right - the Mariners are the number one team in all of baseball right now. Yahoooo!

To mark our happiness, we all donned team gear today. Go Ms. And clearly, I need to start researching World Series tickets.

ON THE EDGE OF SPACE: I've reported on these 'pages' that we've been keeping an eye on NASA's "Launch Madness" event, launching five rockets in a little over five minutes from Wallops, Virginia. Early Tuesday, just before 2 am, the launch, which had been stalled for days and days, finally took place.

image credit: NASA

The launch involved five suborbital sounding rockets as part of a study of the upper level jet stream. The rockets released chemical tracers, which can be seen in the photo above. Per NASA, "Tracking the way the clouds move can help scientists understand the movement of the winds some 65 miles up in the sky, which in turn will help create better models of the electromagnetic regions of space that can damage man-made satellites and disrupt communications systems."  Once it started going down, they didn't waste any time in getting those five rockets launched. The video was a sight to behold, but what a sight to see that would have been in person.

PATHWAY TO THE STARS: This morning we enjoyed another live Web cast in the NASA Digital Learning Network's STEM Through the Eyes, Ears and Heart of a Woman series. Today's host was Bridget Ziegelaar, an ISS External Communications manager for NASA.

Ziegelaar shared her preschool-through-college path with viewers. She says she toyed with everything from being a pitcher for the Red Sox to a 'major soap opera star' (LOL) but when she saw the movie "Space Camp" in the 1980s, she was instantly convinced a career with NASA was the way to go. She worked long and hard to make that dream a reality, including majoring in mechanical engineering (she was the only woman in her freshman class). 

She loves her job and we would have loved to hear more about it, but we had to leave to get to Annabelle's art class.   

PET POPULATION: And suddenly, the pet population in our household has EXPLODED. We have eight new mealworms to "thank" for that. (All together now, "Ewwwww!")  It's part of the insect unit the kids are studying in science.

The mealworms are lovingly ensconced in two plastic condiment containers. Apparently they're ours to lovingly tend to for the next 2.5 months. Today we learned that these mealworms are the larval form of the mealworm beetle. Wonder if we'll have them long enough to see the metamorphosis. Per Wikipedia, they typically spend 10 days as an egg, 12 to 54 days as larva, 20 days as pupa and then 60 to 90 days as an adult. 

BONUS SHOT: