FIT FOR A KING: Our house smelled like Graceland all day. Or, at least what I imagine Graceland's kitchen smelled like, back in the day The King was ordering up eats from the kitchen help.
On January 8, the birthday of Elvis Aron Presley, MPA most always does something to celebrate. Often, it involves food, because Elvis' love of food was legendary.
Above is an Elvis cake I made awhile back for my mom. It was banana, with peanut butter filling, inspired by Elvis' penchant for fried banana and peanut butter sandwiches. Today, we used that as an inspiration for breakfast. I made the kids peanut butter and banana pancakes.
Spoken like a 9 year old who watches more than her fair share of "Chopped," don't you think?
The kids got their hands dirty in the kitchen, too. They had fun shaking chicken legs in brown bags to coat them in flour and seasoning. They also measured ingredients for the biscuits ...
SOLAR SCRUB: We were gearing up to watch the Antares rocket launch this morning as part of an ISS re-supply mission, but it was scrubbed AGAIN. Yesterday, the cold weather caused the postponement. Today? The sun was to blame.
More specifically, the launch was scrubbed due to "excessive space radiation." First time I'd ever heard that reason used!
Turns out, yesterday, the sun unleashed a heckuva flare.
The launch postponement is a bummer, but one upside from the flare is that many people have a way higher than normal chance of seeing the Northern Lights (that's on my bucket list) - IF they have clear skies. The light show is expected to be visible on the morning of Jan. 9, between midnight and dawn (that's just after midnight tonight/Wednesday).
Naturally, it is raining like CrAzY here today, with zero estimated chance of any clearing before dawn's early light. Grrrr. But I hope someone(s) in the lower 48 gets to see them for the first time! More info on how and where to look here: http://earthsky.org/space/sun-unleashes-x-flare.
The launch has been re-rescheduled. They're going to try tomorrow at 10:07 a.m. US West Coast time. We'll be watching.
HOT AND COLD: The kids had fun in science class today. A super simple experiment clearly and quickly demonstrated how molecules expand and are less dense when they're heated, and how they're more dense when they're cold.
Two color-full cups were submerged in room-temperature water. Can you guess which colored cup had the hot water in it, and which had the ice water?
I'd always known that major league baseballs were rubbed in some special mud before being put into play, but I never stopped to ponder the story behind the mud. This book changed that. We learned the backstory about the mud, as well as the man who brought it to the majors.
Blackburne was nowhere near a good enough baseball player to make it to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, but a bucket of his mud is there!
In small print at the end of the book, there was a note that 'complimentary educational resources' regarding the book were available online at lerneresource.com
I had to create an account on their site (it took about 15 seconds) and then sign in, but then I repeatedly got a message about some Boolean error, and I couldn't get to the PDFs. BUMMER. I was about to give up entirely, but I closed everything, re-opened it and it worked, finally. The 'eSource' was a two-page article by Miracle Mud author David A. Kelly about how he researched the book. Cool! The kids will read it tomorrow.
The mud marketer's Web site included a link to a CNN story about baseball's 'dirty little secret.'
You can check it out here: http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/10/28/baseball.mud/index.html
In my digging around, I also found a PDF published by the state of New Jersey (home of the miracle mud): http://www.state.nj.us/drbc/library/documents/edweb/mud.pdf
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