Off Broadway

BE OUR GUEST: Last night we went to the lovely Paramount Theatre to see a touring production of Broadway's "Beauty and the Beast."

It was a full house, with lots of families in attendance. If I were to write a review, I'd say the sets were the most impressive part of the production. But let's leave the rest of the reviewing to CJ and Annabelle. Today, instead of putting pencil to paper for their writing practice, I asked them each to email me a review. That gave them practice opening and using their email accounts, and keyboarding practice to boot. Plus, then I was able to just copy and paste their reviews. :)

Beauty And The Beast: By: CJ

Beauty And The Beast was a "OKAY" play. It had singing, dancing, and had SOOOOO MUCH AND SOOOOO MUCH MORE. It was very similar to the movie, mainly because of the lines, and the music. (And not to forget the costumes!)

Beauty And the Beast Had a great stage, mainly because of the decoration. Beauty And The Beast had great characters. (Including Belle and the Beast!) Beauty And The Beast had great special effects, Like fog, Floating things, And more. Overall, Beauty And The Beast gets a 10/10. THE END!

Beauty And The Beast by Annabelle

The Beauty and the Beast play was very good! The lines sounded like the actual movie and the costumes were great! The lights were very flashy, especially when the beast turned back into a prince.

My favorite parts were the "Be our guest," song and the part just talked about,the part when the Beast turns back into the prince.The settings looked very good and neat,too! Lumiere's flames and the fireplace weren't real fire, but looked like it! Overall, it was a very great play!

The End.

Here are the kids waiting out in the lobby ...

And here's a bad cell phone shot of the marquee after the show. If you look closely in the crowd, you might see Rick and Ken, who also enjoyed the show (but probably wouldn't include quite as many exclamation points in a written review).

A DIFFERENT APPROACH: This has been the face of math in our house the last couple of days:

Not happy - long struggles at the counter top with math books and scratch paper. Today I decided we all needed a change, so I grabbed a small dry erase board and the three of us sat on the couch and worked through multiple long division problems together.

There were a few bumps, but overall it was a lot less stressful and the kids seemed to be catching on when it came to remembering the steps involved. 

PROJECTS: The kids spent some time building with LEGOs today. CJ was very impressed with a rescue vehicle Annabelle constructed.

Annabelle spent some time on Disney's Web site today - specifically in the "Create" part of go,disney.com.

Using the Wild Tales: Wolves Edition Motion Comic she came up with this:

IT IS WRITTEN: This morning, CJ began quizzing me about the Bible. Not its contents, but its history. He wanted to know when and where the first Bible was published, what the 'newest' Bible is, about different versions of it, and so on.

So, we spent some time doing some Internet research. We talked about the first printed version - the Gutenberg Bible, and learned that it was the first major book in the west to be printed with movable type, and the first major book produced using a printing press anywhere in the world. The Library of Congress' copy is pictured here:

photo by Mark Pellegrini on August 12, 2002

We learned that as of 2009, just 48 of Gutenberg's 42-line (per page) Bibles were known to exist, but only 21 of those 48 were complete. 

We talked about how there is no single or common version of the Bible, as the book has been hand transcribed or printed in countless variations, with changed content and order varying between denominations. We also talked about how translating it between languages can result in some changes.

CJ began browsing high-priced Bibles on eBay. We saw some with several hundred dollar price tags.

EXCHANGE:  We hear on a near daily basis from strangers how polite CJ and Annabelle are, and that is gratifying. It's something we've worked long and hard on, and continue to work on, of course. I was happy when I overheard a little exchange today involving CJ asking Annabelle to share a snack. In a nice tone CJ asked, "Annabelle, do you mind if I have a bite of this?"

She didn't hesitate in responding, "No, not at all."

It was just so nice to hear 7 and 8 year old siblings talking to each other so politely, and I told them so.

Not So Awesome

ON OF THEM DAYS:  There are good days, and there are bad days. Today definitely fell into the latter camp. I won't bore you with details, but let's just say a lowlight involved long, long, loooooooong division, kitchen catastrophes and perhaps the zenith (so far) was the dog p*&&ing on my bed.

Ah, good times, good times.

I suppose we can't win them all.

Hopefully today will take a turn for the better. We're off to see the traveling Broadway production of Beauty & The Beast.

But for now, I leave you with this, on the anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of the Alamo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYfjq3ZYZbA

Mid-Week

CUTE(?) COUPLE: We drove through Kingston yesterday in order to get to a ferry to take us back to the mainland. In Kingston, we encountered a stand of carved characters, including this duo. I'm not sure if the kids were tickled or creeped out by them - maybe some of both. They sure took a big steamy gawk. And the long faced statues stared back, of course.

"I think she had real flowers," Annabelle said softly, as he headed for the ferry.

I learned today Kingston used to be called Appletree Cove. That was a sweet sounding name. I was wondering why it changed. According to Wikipedia, a man named Michael King bought a cabin in Appletree Cove in the late 1800s and moved in with some loggers. They cleared trees in the area and built many small buildings and shacks, which became ramshackle. The derelict development was referred to as "King's Town," which morphed into "Kingston."

If I lived 'round there, I think I'd petition for a return to Appletree Cove.

IN REVIEW: As a writing exercise today, I had the kids jot down a couple of paragraphs about Port Townsend. I rejected CJ's first draft. It was too long on superlatives (It was great!) but lacked detail.

Eventually, he came up with this:

"Port Townsend is a great place. In Port Townsend there was a nice hotel called The Tides Inn. The Tides Inn was nice because it had nice air freshening, a cool Jucuzi, a comfortable bed, and mutch, mutch more.

"Eventually, we went to a restaurant called The Public House. In The Public House if you look closely, you can see Puget Sound. Before we left, we went to a restaurant called The Pizza Factory."

Clearly CJ's main memories revolve around his stomach. :)

Annabelle wrote the following:

Port Townsend is a very nice and sunny place. There is a lot of restaurants and stuff to do. In the room (at The Tides Inn) that we stayed in there was a Jacuzzi, a bathroom, 2 bedrooms and an outdoor deck (where the Jacuzzi was).

Some of the restaurants I went to were The Public House, The Roadside Diner and The Pizza Factory. We also went to the actual Fort Worden! Our apartment was good, the food was good, overall I think our trip to Port Townsend was great!

ANOTHER REVIEW: The kids knocked out a chapter review exercise today in math. Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, often with some combination thereof. Can't wait to see what the next chapter holds for us!

DROP AND GIVE ME 10: While the kids were doing their math and writing today, I tired of them dropping their gosh-darned pencils every 5 freaking minutes or so. It's such a waste of time when that happens, as it almost always (of course) rolls under the couch or the kitchen island. And so, to help them remember to hold on to their gosh-darned pencils, I told them our new rule would be 10 push ups every time you dropped your pencil.

At that point, I learned that neither one of them could do anything remotely resembling a push up and so now we have something else to work on - hooray!

NUMBERS AND STARS: We read a couple of great library books today. First up was "Math Fables" by Greg Tang. I wish we'd discovered this book 3 years ago or so, as it was a bit young for CeeJ and Bee now. According to Greg Tang's author's note, a youngster's success in math "is often determined by how fluent children are with numbers, the language of math." The book uses animals to illustrate short stories or fables involving numbers. It was well written, making "the language of math" inviting and accessible. Six thumbs up from the three of us.

Next up was the lovely "Once Upon a Starry Night," by Jacqueline Mitton and Christina Balit, and published by National Geographic. A beautiful book about the constellations. Lavishly colored illustrations of some of the more famous heavenly bodies were adorned with shiny stars in strategic places. The illustrations told the legends of how constellations like Pegasus, Lyra, Hercules, Centaurus and so on came to be. CJ wanted to know why the legends all seemed to be about dying. I told him that my speculation would be that a) for thousands of years, people have been forwarding the notion that people go to heaven or the heavens when they die and b) for thousands of years, people have been trying to explain why there were stars in our sky.

CJ, especially, loved the book. As soon as we were done, he asked to read it again, and he revisited it several times throughout the day.

WHEN PANCAKES ATTACK: I did something out of the ordinary this a.m.; I made chocolate chip pancakes (because we were out of every other breakfast food on the kids' hit parade).

HEY! THAT'S EXACTLY CJ'S AGE!: Tonight we watched the unbelievably horrible news that third grade boy shot his classmate at a school in Bremerton today. When she heard the shooter's age, 8, Annabelle said, incredulously, 'Hey, that's exactly CJ's age!"

As we watched the news, we had Big Talks about what you'd do if you found a gun, if you saw a gun, if a friend had a gun, on and on.

Port Townsend Part II

CATCHING UP: Our Internet connection was too slow yesterday to include all of our Port Townsend goings on, so we'll do a bit of catching up here.

When we arrived in Port Townsend on Sunday early afternoon, we were too early to check into our hotel room, so we drove around town a bit. We couldn't help but gravitate toward a mammoth, eye-catching building atop the bluff overlooking Port Townsend. When I saw the gun locker in the parking lot, I figured it to be a courthouse. Indeed it is/was - the Jefferson County Courthouse. It has a 124-foot high clock tower, which helped us keep track of when we could check into our room. ;)

Though we suspected the building was old (as is the case with so many buildings in the old part of Port Townsend), it was in such good repair we wondered if it was a new building built to look old. Turns out it is, indeed, a very old building - in fact, the second oldest courthouse in the state of Washington. (Here is a link to a PDF about the building's history: http://www.co.jefferson.wa.us/services/courthouse_pamphlet.pdf)

Port Townsend was founded in 1851, and it's the county seat (and only incorporated city) of Jefferson County. Construction of the courthouse was approved in 1890. The beautiful bricks featured on the exterior (786 tons!) were shipped in from St. Louis, while tons of sandstone were brought in from Alaska. The solid brass clock mechanism and bell in the tower were built by the E. Howard Watch & Clock Company of Boston, Mass. in 1891.

As we ogled the courthouse's exterior, we noticed a vacant tennis court right next door. We just happened to have our equipment in the car, so we hit a few balls around, enjoying the fantastic view at each end of the court.

In town, we also checked out Union Wharf.

I read online that Union Wharf was removed and reconstructed after the original, historic waterfront dock collapsed (yikes!).

FORT NOTES: While we spent the VAST majority of our time at Fort Worden tromping around the old battlement grounds, we did visit their history museum on site. There, we watched a video about the history of the fort and its weaponry, and we saw guns, guns and more guns. Anyone into firearms would totally dig this place. On the other hand, we're just not that into them, so we didn't spend a huge amount of time ogling them.

CJ was very interested in a small display they had of Nazi Germany artifacts. CJ, who shares a birthday with Hitler, simply can't understand how such an evil, murderous guy ever got into a position of such power.

The kids were also interested in an artifact from a Japanese submarine attack on the Oregon Coast during World War II.

At the museum we were also introduced to the (unofficial) mascot of the Air Defense Artillery, the Oozlefinch. It was a new one on us!

We weren't sure what kind of creature it was. It looked kind of like a geoduck, a seal, a bird of some kind ... According to Wikipedia, its motto is "If it flies, it dies. Blazing skies." Wiki says it's a missile-bearing bird. Odd looking bird, indeed.

I have to admit, as we wandered through the battlements, CJ and Annabelle seemed to be more interested in the thousands of graffiti specimens than the old battlements. Mostly it was just taggers writing their names, or scrawling obscenities, but once in awhile we'd see something that required a bit more work.

Though our motel (The Tides Inn) didn't have a pool, the kids had HOURS of fun in the Jacuzzi on our room's deck. Good times (well, except for the 10 or so chilly minutes we accidentally got locked outside on the deck while Christian was in the room in the shower).

THE MARTIANS ARE COMING! THE MARTIANS ARE COMING!: "The War of the Worlds" is on AMC tonight. Sweet!

Annabelle started reading the H.G. Wells' classic a few days ago. Wonder if the kids will think it's super corny or if it will scare 'em a little. Guess we'll find out ... It's pretty humorous so far. The 'meteor' has crash landed and the locals are enjoying square dancing. Little do they know, things are about to take a turn for the worse. ...

Port & Fort

BACK IN TIME: It was cold, windy and very, very gray, but I was happy to see it wasn't raining when we awoke this morning in Port Townsend, because on our agenda was a walking tour of sprawling Fort Worden.

Named for US Navy Rear Admiral John Lorimer Worden, commander of the USS Monitor during the Civil War, Fort Worden is 433 acres. It was originally built as a US Army installation to protect the Puget Sound area, and it served as an active US Army base from 1902 to 1953. In 1957, the State of Washington purchased it and for years it was a juvenile detention facility.

By 1973, it had been converted to a state park.  Today museums, campgrounds, a theater, schools and more dot the grounds.

We spent about four hours exploring the state park at the northeast corner of the Olympic Peninsula, on Admiralty Inlet.

We clambered around so many abandoned battlements. In a way, it reminded me of seeing ancient Mayan ruins in Mexico ... although these were hundreds of years newer. Can you find CJ and Annabelle standing atop a lookout?

Here they are inside, scanning the horizon for any enemy threat.

They decided to let this cargo ship go on through. ...

The guns and soldiers were long gone. All that remained were the beat up battlements with their decaying concrete and rusted metal. It was nice to try to picture them in all their glory, with hundreds of troops running 'round ...

 

A few of the battlements had their blueprints on a sign nearby. Below, CJ and Annabelle sit at the site where those plans were draw up, by engineers, long before they had benefit of computers or even calculators.

We scaled sketchy, steep staircases and ventured through the concrete bowels of bunkers. 

We braved tunnels and trenches.

 

Most of the subterranean parts of the battlements were tomb like, but every so often we'd encounter a rare 'skylight.'  

Mostly things had been stripped bare, but once in awhile we'd stumble across a gizmo from generations gone by - in this case an antique generator. 

 

There's a century-plus-year-old lighthouse at Fort Worden. It's more stubby than stately and is in disrepair, but it had its own charm, as lighthouses do.

 

 

 And we saw lots of deer- and deer droppings - today. 

I have more photos, but our motel has no Internet access (I know, the HORROR!), so I'm using Christian's cell phone to create a Wi-Fi hot spot and it works but is s-l-o-w. It's a miracle I got this much posted. So, until tomorrow, from Port Townsend.