Blossoming

 
EARLY BLOOMERS:  Behold, a Edgeworthia chysantha or Chinese paper bark, a native of China and Nepal was putting on a show for us in the garden on the north side of the locks in Ballard. Gorgeous.

We went for a good long walk Sunday, parking on the south side of the estuary between Lake Union and Puget Sound. From there, we walked the path past the stand of trees famous for harboring blue heron nests. Because we're locals, we knew to look up. ...

Lots of action going on overhead. We could see several single herons and pairs sharing a nest. Tourists followed our lead and trained their cameras overhead, too. ;)

We fought out way through the crowds and checked out the gardens on the north side of the locks. 

Meanwhile, back at the MPA ranch, we're still waiting on the kids' daffodils. They planted the bulbs last November, and we've been excitedly watching their progress these last few weeks. Most of the other daffodils in the 'hood have bloomed already. We're wondering if these two are taking longer because they're newbies.

IN REVIEW:  Annabelle just finished reading a book called "Cold Cereal." Here's a short synopsis from her...

Cold Cereal is a book series written by Adam Rex about a young boy named Scottish Play Doe (his real name is Macbeth, but it's bad luck to say that). Scott thinks he sees things, but realizes he doesn't when one of his 'hallucinations' tries to steal his backpack! It turns out that the elf-man stealing his backpack was a leprechaun, one of the mythical creatures known as the Fay, which can only be seen by certain people. The Fay are being captured by the local GoodCo™ brand cereal to drain their magic, and now it's up to Scott to save them! The book is not only centered around Scott, though. It also features Erno and his sister Emily, who isn't exactly normal either. The book has good humor and great story line. The characters are realistic and everything just seems to click together. I would definitely recommend the Cold Cereal book(s).

THE ADVENTURE CONTINUES: The European Space Agency has released a second cartoon about their Rosetta spacecraft and its amazing little comet landing probe, Philae. 

The first cartoon was absolutely charming and the second one continued in that tradition. It's definitely worth a look!

http://youtu.be/33zw4yYNGAs

GET WITH THE PROGRAM:  We are in week 2 of the newest Coursera class we started, "Beginning Game Programming with C#."

We're slowly but surely. I feel like I'm in over my head already, but the kids seem less daunted. 

Our assignment this week was to create and load three 'sprites' in a program and write code so that the sprite images would be randomly generated to the middle of the screen and then move about the screen. Sounds simple, doesn't it? 

And frankly, it looks simple when you see a screen capture video of what I created. ... 

But it's actually rather complicated. And we're nowhere near creating anything like a real game yet. ... :0