Eggs in a Basket

LAYING IN SUPPLIES: Part of today was spent readying for next week. It's no ordinary week, it's Hunger Action Week, an annual awareness event by the United Way of King County. I do believe it's our third year of participating.

Hunger is an issue affecting 13 percent of King County residents (that's more than 1 in 10 of our neighbors). During the week, the challenge for participants is to live on a "food stamp budget." If you're a single person, that's $7 a day. If you're a household of four, like us, you get $22. (Hold it .. why don't we get $28 [4x7], but I digress.)

Anyway, per the rules we get $22 a day to use towards food. So today, to help make those dollars stretch as far as possible, we went on a long distance grocery grab, down to Winco in Kent. It's a haul that co$t$ some in gas, but more than makes up for it in what we save, I think.

We went armed with a calculator, to make sure we were getting the most, money wise  out of every morsel.

For instance, as we approached the cooler where eggs were, we saw we had our choice between 98 cents per dozen or $2.30 for an 18 count carton. I asked the kids to figure out which we should buy and stood there waiting for them and their maths to make the magic and the decision. I did give them the hint that if they could figure out a per-egg price, we'd be on our way to our answer.

CJ came up with the bright idea of taking the price of the carton and dividing the number of eggs into it. Eggcellent! :)  He did the 18-pack first and found out the price is 12.7777 cents per egg. He and Annabelle then calculated that the dozen egg pack price translated into 8.2 cents per egg. Guess which pack we bought?

Yup, cheaper by the dozen. I have to think that Easter's impending arrival has helped with the egg prices.

We are going to be eating a LOT of eggs next week.

Anyone, anywhere can participate in this exercise. We invite you to join us. :)

http://www.uwkc.org/news-events/event-calendar/haw/

MR. GOLDEN SUN: We started our day with guitar practice and some "Let's Dance"  exercise before settling down to tune in to the NASA Edge broadcast.

It was great. Since this is Solar Week, we learned all sorts of things about our sun.

One segment of the program was all about the Van Allen probes. It included an update about a surprise NASA probes discovered this year - a third belt around our planet. 

Another segment was all about the Northern Lights, featuring an interview with Doug Rowland.

Hey, speaking of  NASA Edge and all things astro-outreach related, damn you, sequestration. Today news came across the Twitterverse and Facebook web that one of the casualties of sequester is basically EVERYTHING under NASA's public information education/outreach budget.

Question: If a rocket launches in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Yeah, of course, the rocket still launches, but dang, NASA in the last couple of years had finally figured out that people NEED to hear the damn rockets Public awareness of the vital projects and programs NASA is involved in helps keep the funds for those things flowing.. And now it's the sound of silence? I sure hope not. It will be interesting, to say the least, to see how this all pans out.