Easy Does It

QUIET TIME: How 'bout that. Today we didn't have any big ol' whoop ti do to do. No museum. No fair. No carnival. No expo. 

Our dogs were glad for our lack of agenda. ;)

This afternoon, we took them down to "Secret Beach" (an end of the road kayak launch in Magnolia), during a very high tide. 

They wished they were retrievers, like the water dog chasing sticks like crazy.

But, alas, they're shore pups.

So, they settled for watching some of their humans frolic on the shore.

TUTORIAL: The kids have been working very hard on a Star Wars fan fic project for the upcoming "Star Wars Reads" day, Saturday, Oct. 10. The Museum of Flight here in Seattle is hosting a competition, and so we'll be sending off their entries to them pretty soon.

Annabelle, a whiz at Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, features five illustrations along with her story, five pictures being the limit per contest rules. 

CJ's story about the cantina band from the original movie is word-centric, but he wanted at least one picture to go along with. Annabelle sat down with him and worked with him to do a draft of some Bith musicians (Bith being the name of the species of the cantina band characters).

I found CJ's drawing (above) after the kids were all done and Annabelle had written "Nice job, CJ!" on the bottom of it, with a star. Sweet. 

Yesterday and today, Annabelle helped CJ take his drawing from paper to Illustrator. It took a few hours, but in the end, CJ was so pleased and proud of the product. (Stay tuned for a look at it.)

LET ME TAKE A SELFIE: CJ started quizzing me about the history of photography - specifically, when it became accessible to the masses - this morning. I know a fair amount on the topic, having toiled many hours in the darkroom back in the day, but we hopped online and did a little research.

While reading, we were delighted to find this photo. It is, reportedly, the very first selfie.

It's of Robert Cornelius, taken in Oct. or Nov. 1839, using an approximate quarter plate daguerreotype. The back of this photo reads, "The first light picture ever taken."
Presumably, it was taken without a selfie stick. ... 

Cornelius took it outside of his family store, at about age 30. The family business included work in silver. The metal is was a crucial element of early photography.

This image, in the public domain, is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3f04912. 

TEASER: We received an interesting email today. Its subject line? "NASA to Announce Mars Mystery Solved."

O really!?! What mystery would that be?!

Sorry, but they're not telling - yet. Per the press release, "Nature Geoscience has Embargoed Details until 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT Sept. 28)." At that time, "NASA will detail a major science finding from the agency's ongoing exploration of Mars ..." The event will be broadcast live on NASA Television and the agency's website (http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv and/or http://www.ustream.tv/NASAJPL) News conference participants will be Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA HQ; Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters; Lujendra Ojha of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta; Mary Beth Wilhelm of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California and the Georgia Institute of Technology; and Alfred McEwen, principal investigator for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The public can ask questions during the briefing using #AskNASA tag on social media (I'm guessing Twitter would be a best bet). We're certainly going to be watching! Hopefully, they're finally going to tell us how ancient Martians dug all those canals.