Wednesday Work

SPRING CLEANING: We stayed home 'most all of today by design. One HUGE magnet was the fact that the Mariners' first televised spring training game was on. How wonderful it was to see and hear baseball once again!

Of course, Annabelle made a pony-themed cartoon to mark the occasion.

And we were absolutely spoiled by an extra-inning game with a Mariners' win today! Fantastic!

We also worked our rears off cleaning out and reorganizing many cubic feet of storage space in the kitchen while the Ms played. In the process of doing so, we unearthed many treasures, including an origami kit. 

Annabelle followed one pattern, but embellished the face details. Cute!

While cleaning, we also found some oversized, fake scissors. Because everyone should have a pair of those, right? They made Kirby a tad nervous as she was getting a bath and trim today. 

SHAPELY:  The kids' math as of late has been pretty simple algebra and now we're moving into working with solid shapes. An exercise in their book this morning asked them if the nets presented would fold up into cuboids. :0

After figuring out what the heck that meant, it was pretty straightforward (will this flat design fold

into this shape ...).

Many they could tell they were a go or not just by looking at the drawings. Others were a bit trickier. For those, they made little templates and tried folding them. 

Worked like a charm!

CIRCLING:  One year from today, we'd love to be in California. Why? Because NASA's next Mars lander, the InSight mission, will be launching from Vandenberg Air Force Base!

In the photo below, you see the lander's arm being tested inside a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, last September.

                     Photo:  NASA/JPL-Caltech

InSight  is an acronym for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport. Rather than roving all over and taking surface photos and measurements, like Spirit, Opportunity, and Mars Science Laboratory have, InSight is all about the Red Planet's deep interior and investigating how rocky planets like Earth evolved.

InSight will mark the first California launch of an interplanetary mission. It's sure a lot closer to Seattle than Florida is! InSight is expected to reach Mars on Sept. 28, 2016. 

More information about InSight is on the mission site: http://insight.jpl.nasa.gov

NO BONES ABOUT IT: This video is making its way 'round the Internet rapidly, with good reason. It had me tearing up over coffee this morning, darn it!

Set to one of our favorite Macklemore & Ryan Lewis songs, the PSA by the Ad Council aims to take on "implicit bias" or subconscious prejudice and its implications on how we view and interact with others who are different from us.

The video (http://youtu.be/PnDgZuGIhHs) is part of their "Love Has No Labels" campaign: www.lovehasnolabels.com

No matter how we're 'wrapped,' under it all, we're just bones. :)