Future Friday

TIME TO START PACKING?: Today, Elon Musk's SpaceX made a trio of retro-riffic styled travel-to-Mars posters available.  

We love their look, not to mention their message.  The one above features the highest peak (three times higher than Everest) in our solar system. 

And how nice of the SpaceX folks to replease them under a Creative Commons  license so people (like me) can share them!

Another poster features Mars' moons. 

Many, including Buzz Aldrin, think Phobos would be a good spot to colonize before actually settling on the Red Planet. 

The third poster features the canyon running along Mars' middle. Three miles deep, it was likely created by water which coursed over Mars' surface eons ago.

The posters remind me of a series of space-y posters on display at Kennedy Space Center, including these two I photographed during my visit there for the Mars Science Laboratory launch.

RED & GREEN:  Our new-to-us produce of the day was going to be a red banana. We bought a couple last night, and this afternoon the kids did the Google to find out how to eat them. Articles they read said they could be peeled and eaten just like a yellow banana, and that they were ripe when they're dark red.

We *thought* our bananas were red enough, but maybe we were comparing them to yellow bananas. ...

But ... I think we were wrong.

Very wrong.

The kids couldn't even peel them, and so they cut them open with knives. When they finally extracted a bite, it was Bitter Banana Face time. Oops.

So, green red bananas are not our new favorite produce.

TESTING, CONTINUED:  We're still plugging away at the available practice tests for the standardized, state mandated tests the kids have to take next week. Today, the test they took was another reading-writing related endeavor.

I'll let you have a look at one of CJ's questions and his answer. 

(Sorry the examples above and below are so small. The test wouldn't let us copy and paste text, so it was a print screen process and this was the best we could do.  If you click on the text/image, it will open larger, in another window.)