Short Report

STRUNG OUT: It was a gloriously sunny weekend and while usually that would mean we would be all over this map, this weekend, well notsomuch. :(

CJ was still ailing big time. We had an event on our calendar Saturday we've been looking forward to for weeks. It was the annual Family Day presented by the Earth & Space Sciences folks at the University of Washington.

We got there early - a little after the 10 a.m. opening. Walking around, the campus seemed like a ghost town compared to when we were there a couple weeks back for Husky Fest. Back then, Red Square, just west of the Salluzzo Library, was teeming with people.

And we had George all to ourselves.

The event we were attending was held inside Johnson Hall. I wonder what these words above the north entrance to the hall say.

The four of us went inside, but when I found the rooms to be crowded and things to be slow-going, I figured taking sickly CJ out of there to be a good idea.

And so, while CJ stretched out on a sunny spot, Annabelle was inside, learning about soils of the Pacific Northwest, temperature extremes, the temperature on Mars (as compared to Earth and our moon), how to make ice cream using liquid nitrogen, rocketry, using microscopes to look at rocks and minerals, lightning and measuring earthquakes. For her efforts she got a cool canvas UW Earth & Space sciences bag and a Junior Scientist diploma. :)

At least the Johnson building courtyard had some cool architecture to check out while they were gone.

OSMOSIS: Today, CJ was still puny and Annabelle's cold is coming on strong. That being the case, I didn't feel like foisting any true school work on them. Instead, I let them spend a good portion of the day poking around the Internet on their laptops, with NASA TV running in the background. I could only hope they'd learn something by osmosis with NASA TV on, and I think they did!

Fortunately, today was a launch day, so NASA TV was extra engaging. Of course these days a "NASA" launch means watching one of our astronauts go up on a paid-for seat on a Soyuz rocket ... but a launch is a launch and it's exciting nonetheless.

We learned about the astro- and cosmonauts that would be headed for the International Space Station today, and about some of the scientific experiments they'd be conducting.

Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

This evening, the Soyuz TMA-04M rocket successfully launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, carrying Expedition 31 Soyuz Commander Gennady Padalka, NASA Flight Engineer Joseph Acaba and Flight Engineer Sergei Revin to the International Space Station.

That is one cool looking rocket, I must say.

STAR LIGHT, STAR BRIGHT: Tonight, as we were coming home from the store around 9 p.m., I asked the kids if they saw any lights in the sky. They both spotted just one bright one, to our north and west.

I asked them if they knew the poem that goes along with seeing the first light in the night sky. They hadn't heard it before so Christian recited it for them: "Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight. I wish I may, I wish I might, have this wish I wish tonight."

I was sitting there thinking how sweet that little poem is when Annabelle groused from the back seat: "That's no STAR. That's VENUS."

LOL. OK, fine, Annabelle. So Venus is not technically "a self-luminous celestial body consisting of a mass of gas held together by its own gravity in which the energy generated by nuclear reactions in the interior is balanced by the outflow of energy to the surface, and the inward-directed gravitational forces are balanced by the outward-directed gas and radiation pressures." (per Houghton Mifflin)