City Campers

LONG STORY: A sunny Friday - hooray! So, this afternoon, during the kids' break between programming/dance and acting classes in West Seattle, we headed to a park I've been wanting to check out for years - Camp Long.

Don't let the morose expression fool you - CJ was happy to be there, I swear ;)

I first discovered Camp Long's existence probably about 15 years ago, when I was online researching potential places to stay in Seattle not too far from Safeco Field when we still lived down south. I always thought it would be a kick to 'camp' out and then go to a ball game, but we just never did it. Camp Long has always been in the back of my mind as a place to check out. Today, it was in the front of my mind. 

Before we left home, I packed the kids a small picnic lunch, and as soon as their morning class ended, we headed for Camp Long, just about 7 minutes away from their 'school.' 

What a treasure the place is! It totally exceeded even my wildest mind's eye visions of what it might be. Camp Long is a heavily forested 68-acre park. It's an amazing emerald oasis in the middle of the city. Here are the kids going into the woods. ... 

We quickly encountered fun ways to cross little waterways.

And we came across several great, rustic cabins you can rent for $50 a night.

The kids *totally* want to do it, and I'm inclined to agree. It's kind of funny thinking of paying that much to 'rough' it for an evening, but the cabins are charming looking, each with an outdoor oven/grill - and a cold, dirty bathroom a bit of a walk away. ;)

One of the park's main draws is a challenging ropes course. This isn't a great photo of it, but take my word for it, it looks like a doozy. It would definitely get the heart racing. The obstacles are pretty darn high off the ground and look plenty wobbly.

You have to rent the ropes course, and there were LOTS of signs telling you to keep off otherwise, so we kept our distance.

We did NOT keep our distance from Schurman Rock. Originally built in 1939 by the Works Progress Association, it's purportedly the first man-made climbing rock in the U.S. It's made from all natural materials, and is named after Clark Schurman, a mountaineer who worked at Camp Long. 

The climbing feature has a variety of routes built into it. You can take it mostly easy, or challenge yourself. The kids clambered right up the rock. They were a little sketched out by coming down, but made it with no real trouble. 

IN OTHER NEWS: I've been working on a whole lot of cookies the last couple of days, including some 3D sun ones. Can you find Annabelle's among the suns? It's the cutest one. :)

Mark Your Calendars

WEEKS TO COME: Today was low-key for MPA. We kept busy, but close to 'campus.' We worked on a long math review chapter (lots of decimals and common deliminators). We wrote haikus about the library. We baked four kinds of cookies and made fondant and royal icing, and the kids had yoga. We had frozen yogurt for lunch and listened to "The Wall," CJ's latest musical obsession.

Oh, and speaking of CJ and music, at about 6:20 this a.m I looked over at him and he was standing and kind of twitching to and fro, with the epicenter somewhere in the vicinity of his hips. I asked him what the heck we was doing and without missing a beat he replied, "The Harlem Shake." Nice. Never too early to start your day off with the latest dance craze. Gangnam Style is sooo last month.

My hands were covered in batter, frosting or some other sticky mess most of the day, so I didn't take any photos. Sorry. Hopefully the multiple dozen I took yesterday bide me some time.

We've got a busy couple of weeks ahead. For instance, March 18-22 is Solar Week. It's a chance to interact live with solar scientists from NASA. Check out the Solar Week Web site for daily curriculum, games, activities and more: http://www.solarweek.org/cms/

And the following week, it's our annual participation in United Way of King County's Hunger Action Week, where we'll live on the grocery budget of a family receiving food stamps. It's always an excellent math exercise and a great reminder of the challenges so many face every single week. Check it out here:  http://www.uwkc.org/news-events/event-calendar/haw/

My Little Pony Mural

FINALLY FINISHED:  We started this 'little' paint project back in December. Annabelle decided she wanted a My Little Pony Themed mural on her walls. So, that's what we did.

We started by finding Ponies she liked, and making composite scenes of them in different My Little Pony backgrounds. We were going for a 360-wrap around look.

We painted in fits and bursts, 15 minutes here, an hour there. Everything had so many colors and layers, it was a slow-going process. That, and Annabelle is an exacting task master. I can't tell you how many nights I was summoned into Annabelle's room at bedtime for some critiquing and change orders - everything from eyelashes to Cutie Marks (you know, those little icons on the ponies' flanks). But that was OK. Nothing wrong with wanting things right.

And, of course, we had to have little details, like Annabelle's custom-designed "Honey Bee," (her alter pony ego, as her nickname's Bee). And there's also a CJ pony, of course.

The closet doors vexed me for a couple weeks. I just didn't know what to do with them. Finally, one day, when looking at MLP photos online, I saw a map of Equestria (their homeland). Bingo! Painting that was a bear, but fun. On the other closet door, we used magnetic paint and made a blank billboard, so Annabelle can post her art in Ponyville.

Here's hoping she continues to love My Little Pony for at least a few more months. ...

Trail and Textbooks

SUNDAY SOOS: Still playing catch up reporting our weekend activities. Sunday afternoon we wanted to go down to Kent to shop at Winco (yes, it's worth the drive), but decided to make more than a grocery-getting outing of it. So, we loaded up two dogs, a scooter and a bike and hit the nearby Soos Creek Trail.

Per the King County Parks Web site, Soos Creek Trail "features a gentle grade in a natural setting suitable for leisurely strolls, bicycle rides and horse rides."  If only we had a horse ...

The trail is 6 miles long. I think we hopped on about the halfway point.

I'm not gonna lie - it was definitely *not* the most picturesque trail we've ever traveled. Mostly views of  scraggly trees, some 70s and 80s era houses with barking dogs, and lots of huge transmission towers. Oh, and every once in awhile a stinky marshy spot. I bet the trail is a lot more 'enchanting' when the trees leaf out.

There were a few points of visual interest though - mostly provided by interesting root structures like this. ...

When we set out from home it was super sunny, but by the time we were walking, the sun was struggling to break through a cloud cover.

I was curious how Soos Creek got its name. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I was able to learn it's what the Skopamish Indians called their village at the mouth of the Green River.  Settlers of the area spelled it Suise originally, but over the years it morphed to Soos. A lot of the land along Soos Creek used to be owned by the railroad company, but in the 1970s, King County Park System acquired it.

HOW THINGS WORK: On Monday we started our new/second Coursera class. It's called "How Things Work 1," taught by Dr. Lou Bloomfield of the University of Virginia.

Monday was the first day of the course, and we decided to dive right in. First, I went to the homework section to see what we were up against. This week, it was just one quiz, but unlike our astrobiology class, and more like the real world, you only get ONE attempt at the quiz. That freaked the kids out a bit. I told them we'd be fine. Probably. We decided to find out by watching all 7 video lectures on the topic of skating for Week 1. 

We learned all sorts of cool physic-y stuff. :) We learned about inertia (that an object at rest tends to remain at rest, and an object in motion tends to remain in motion). We learned Newton's First Law of Motion, that velocity is a vector measurement of the rate/amount and direction of motion, or the rate at which an object's position is changing with time. We learned that acceleration is the rate at which an object's velocity is changing with time. We now know a bit about net force, mass, and Newton's Second Law of Motion (F = ma).

After watching all the videos, it was test time. We were a little nervous since it was the 'first day of school' for this class. I couldn't help but wonder if we'd be better prepared for the test if we owned the textbook to go along with the class, so I followed the link and .... prepare for digression.  GOOD GOD -- $172?!?!?  It's a non fiction book, containing physics facts - principles which have been written/known about for decades/centuries - and these facts are readily available for a WHOLE lot less (like FREE) from any number of sources. I mean $172 damn dollars?! I like books. I buy books. I have copies of first edition books, and books autographed by astronauts that cost a FRACTION of what the publisher is charging for this textbook. This book is not bundled with a CD or a new car or anything ... Naturally, I checked out the electronic version of the book as an alternative. That has to be lots cheaper, right? I mean it costs the publisher NOTHING to print or ship. But wait, it's not even on sale. You can BORROW (that's right, not own, but BORROW) an electronic version of the text for a year for $52. FIFTY TWO DOLLARS! For a loaner PDF about physics 101 ($1 goes to charity, BTW). 

Curious, I went to Amazon and searched for "introduction to physics" books. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of them, starting at under a dollar for electronic books, and  lots and lots of titles for around $10-$20 if you don't mind 'used' (which often means virtually untouched but previously owned). I did find I could buy a used copy of How Things Work for $39. That's more like it. 

I read a couple of articles about the cost of textbooks. A story in the Huffington Post says the American Enterprise Institute  a think tank, reports textbook prices are 812 percent higher than they were in 1978. The textbooks' price even outpaced the 559 percent increase in tuition and fees over that time period. 

All this said, I realize the irony of me complaining about the price of a textbook for a wonderful, free class. ... Back to that class. ...

So, we took the Week 1 quiz. It was challenging, which is good. It wasn't just a matter of regurgitation concepts or examples we'd heard in the videos. Rather, we had to take the info we learned and demonstrate that we understood it, as the questions presented scenarios and we had to figure out how/which laws of physics were involved. I was THRILLED when I scored a 9 out of 10. CJ scored the same and was near tears. He was mad because he knew the right answer to the one he missed, he just checked the wrong box. Annabelle was our only perfect score of the day. 

SO CLOSE: I put probably 3 hours into the never-ending My Little Pony mural today. As a result, never-ending has changed to damn-near done. I should be finished tomorrow, with 30 minutes of work, tops. Hooray! Photos to come.

Polar Science Saturday!

PACSCI POLAR SCIENCE WEEKEND! Saturday we enjoyed what has become an annual event for us - attending NASA-sponsored Polar Science Weekend at Pacific Science Center. It's a great place to meet face-to-face with all sorts of scientists with interesting specialties. 

We got there as soon as the event opened - 10 a.m., and for the next 90 minutes we made our way between booths. One of our favorite destinations is the narhwhal zone!

There, the kids got to pretend they were 'unicorns of the sea,' by strapping on tusks. Then, they were ready to play a narwhal migration game.

The kids braved the salinity taste test, got their hands on some glacial ice,and learned about how glaciers form and move.

There were a number of booths that addressed the issue of climate change on creatures of the arctic. In this "Seal Sleuths" game, the kids saw the dramatic effect disappearing ice had on seals' survival.

 Less ice means more seals into the drink. Poor seals. :(

Tacoma's Point Defiance Zoo had info about arctic animals, including musk ox and polar bears. CJ and Annabelle  checked out how their paws measured up to a polar bear's.

At a booth staffed by UW grad students, the kids played a game which demonstrated the delicate balance of the ice in the arctic. There were two types of squares, blue for water and white for ice. At the game's start there was an equal amount of ice and water. The kids took turn drawing cards, and those had real world things that can happen on them, like water getting warmer, volcanoes erupting, sunlight reflection, and meteorite strikes. They would flip the squares to white or blue, based on the pro- or con-ice cards and watch the domino effect. 

At about 11:30, it was time for us to head to the IMAX theater for a movie, "Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure."

Ernest Shakleton's expedition to Antarctica (1914-1916) in hopes of being the first man to cross that continent is, quite possibly, the greatest survival story of all time. It's the story of 28 men who worked as a team to overcome a series of monumental obstacles in order to survive nearly two years of being stranded in the Antarctic. 

I read the book "Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage" in college (named after the ship that became icebound, stranding the explorers), so I was very familiar with the trials the men faced. (Here's a photo of the doomed vessel, taken by the crew's photographer, Frank Hurley.)

The story was new to the rest of the family, and they were mightily amazed and impressed.

Afterward, we went back upstairs for some more exploring of our own. Even though they remembered (not fondly) the salty water taste from last year, the kids each braves a salinity taste test.  They also checked out their temperatures with the aid of a heat-sensing FLIR camera.

They also got to use a probe to measure the temp of ice, dry ice and sand.  

As we were making our way out of the event, we happened upon Live Science show starting. Lucky us! The show  featured Dr. Mike Steele, an esteemed oceanographer from the University of Washington  He  specializes in the Arctic Ocean, and he conducted a number of fun experiments, most of them using liquid nitrogen.

After the show, the liquid nitrogen was poured out into the PacSci fountains. That was quite a spectacle of frosty fog!

HAPPY BERTH DAY: This weekend, we eagerly awaited reports from the International Space Station regarding the approach and connection of SpaceX's Dragon capsule.

                                  Canadian Space Agency/Chris Hadfield

Launched Friday morning, Dragon's thrusters had trouble once it reached orbit, which made for some anxious moments/hours. Fortunately, the crack SpaceX crew worked through the trouble and by Saturday, Dragon had been given permission to approach the station. 

The approach and capture of Dragon by the ISS's Canada arm happened in the wee small ours of Sunday morning our time. Here's a video of the operation.
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=160534571


On board the ISS, on Sunday, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield had this to say about Dragon's arrival: "What a day! Reached and grabbed a Dragon, berthed her to Station and opened the hatch to find fresh fruit, notes from friends and peanut butter."

HAT TIP: On Saturday morning, we tipped our red-and-white-striped Cat-in-the-Hat type hats to Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. Mar. 2 is his birthday, and we've taken to observing it annually with green eggs and ham. Newsflash - the kids actually ATE the eggs this year!