Unleashed

SLICE OF BLUE: After days and days of gray, we finally got a few slivers of blue sky this afternoon. That prompted us to push school work aside and head outside.

We just walked up to the neighborhood park. With our dogs on leashes, the way you're supposed to do it.

We're lucky we got to have any play time at all, for the very instant we arrived at the park, the kids (who each had a leash) and the dogs were literally run over by an enormous 120 pound 'puppy.' Cute, friendly dog, but its owner is an idiot.

The dog's owner, an elderly gentleman who was absolutely NO match for a dog of that size and strength, apparently decided that the park was his and his dog's own personal off leash area, and I saw him unhooking  his dog when we walked up. Mistake. The dog quickly covered 30 yards between us and it and proceeded to run circles around the kids, and pounce on Kirby and Laika, which were each less than 1/10th of its weight.

I kept a low, calm voice the entire time, so as not to get the kids or any dogs riled, saying things like 'Oh, look at the nice big dog who wants to play," etc. which CJ and Annabelle did a great job not panicking, not letting go of their leashes, while watching their dogs get trounced.

Fortunately, Laika and Kirby don't have a mean bone in their bodies, so they just took the trouncing as play - which it was, but it was still dicey and totally NOT cool, because they were so outmatched size wise and hampered by the fact they WERE on a leash.

The 'gentleman' who owned the dog FINALLY managed to amble over to where we were and he was completely flustered and overwhelmed by all of it. He finally managed to grab his dog and that's when the real scary stuff started, because he was no match for the huge, strong, young thing. I was sure the man was going to wind up getting knocked over onto the concrete. Fortunately, that didn't happen. He finally got a leash on the dog and then he proceeded to grab it by the neck and get in its face and was SCREAMING at it, about it being a bad dog, and was shaking its head. Ugh. Like it's the dog's fault it wanted to play with the other dogs. Frankly, the man was the one who needed to be shaken and yelled at for being such a jackass and letting his gargantuan dog off leash at a playground (as opposed to an off leash dog park).

Despite our rocky start, we managed to have a nice time at the park.

CELLS & STUFF: This morning we found our seats in the 'lecture hall' (our living room) of our 39,000 student class on astrobiology through the University of Edinburgh. We listened to two more lectures in our class' series, totaling about 40 minutes. Today's sessions were "What is Life?" and "Structure of Life: Cells."
Fascinating stuff! 

As our professor pointed out, before you can start looking for like on other planets, you need to have a definition for 'life.' Excellent point. And so we went over what the characteristics of life are. For instance, life is complex, and it exhibits complex behavior, it grows, it replicates/divides, it metabolizes (eats/needs energy), it has a system for storing info (DNA) and it evolves. We also covered the fact that the elements needed for life by our human definition are carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and sulfur, for starters. Ultimately, though, life is difficult to define accurately, and it's just a human definition. 

The second lecture we watched today was about the structure of cells. We learned cells have three major features - a membrane to enclose the chemical reactions; an energy system (necessary to reproduce); and an information storage system. 

We learned about how cell membranes are formed (so interesting!), and that when it comes to DNA cytosine and guanine only link together, and adenine and thymine only link with one another. 

We learned the differences between heterotrophs (that's you and me - we use organic carbon for growth!), phototrophs (plants/trees/photosynthesis lifeforms), and chemolithotrophs (like rock dwelling bacteria which uses molecules, such as sulfur compounds, to gain energy).      

We learned that elements together form molecules, and the molecules come together to form larger structures, such as DNA and proteins, and that life needs water to build molecules. And on, and on and on.  We took the second quiz of the course - this time 20 questions instead of 10, like the first. There were some good, challenging questions that gave us pause, but in the end we each got 100 percent - w00t!

SILLY STUFF: Here are a couple of leftovers from a couple of days ago, when we got to the kids' north classes early, and they used the Photobooth feature on the library computers to generate these creepy self portraits.