Diamonds and Asteroids

THE OLD BALL GAME: Tuesday, I had to drive down to Portland for an appointment. All the way down, I listened to sports radio, and all the way back. By the time I was halfway home, I was dying to go to the Mariners' game that evening.

I called Christian at about 3:30 to ask if he and the kids wanted to meet me at Safeco Field in a couple of hours. They hopped on a bus, I scored a parking spot on the street for free, and we actually arrived at the same street corner within 30 seconds of one another. Pretty amazing.

The kids were thrilled to see I had a big pizza from their favorite place down south. And so, they sat by the bullpen during batting practice and enjoyed their favorite pizza. Talk about a great dinner!

 Speaking of batting practice, we managed to come away with another ball!

It was rocketed out of the stadium by Pirates star Andrew McCutchen. We held onto it for nearly the whole game, but in the ninth, we spied a young Pirates fan in a McCutchen jersey and Christian and Annabelle gave it to the boy. He was pretty pleased. :)

All told, we got cheap tickets (thanks, random scalper), had great pizza, free parking, easy ingress, and the Mariners won convincingly. Good times!

ON YOUR MARKERS: A couple of weeks ago, Annabelle was gifted a set of super fancy Copic markers from our awesome Buy Nothing group. This set of markers retails for around $185 for the set she was gifted, if you can believe that.

The markers are special because they let you masterfully blend colors. Annabelle takes them with her frequently when we leave the house. Last night, in about an hour's time span, she produced all of the above at a local eatery. It was fun watching people's reactions as they walked past the table. One family stopped to chat on their way out. They had a girl a couple of years older than Annabelle who just *loved* her drawings, and so Annabelle gave her one. The girl was so thrilled. She actually came back into the place and over to the table a couple of minutes later to ask Annabelle her name so she could say she knew her before she was famous.  Pretty sweet. 

ASTEROID EVENT: This afternoon, Christian took the kids to the Museum of Flight to check out an Asteroid Day 'celebration.' 

Turns out June 30 is Asteroid Day because it marks the anniversary of the 1908 Siberian Tunguska asteroid impact - the largest such event in Earth's recent history. It took out 10 million trees, 20 miles in every direction from the point of impact.

I'll let the kids tell you about their afternoon field trip. Annabelle writes first ... 

The Museum of Flight had an event today called “asteroid day”. When we arrived, we didn’t know it was going to be as small as it was. It took up the Alaska Airlines aerospace education center area, so it only had about 3 things you could do. The first thing was make a solar system “model”, which was just gluing pom-poms onto a piece of paper, from what I could tell. They also had a flat cutout of earth with holes to throw “meteors” through. The meteors were just tinfoil balls with red, orange, and yellow ribbon (like fire) coming out of them. The one thing I did do was a small sandbox activity where you would dig up different rocks that might represent minerals you might find while digging on an asteroid (e.g. rhinestones represented diamonds, malachite represented copper). It wasn’t all I expected it to be, but it was nonetheless good for younger kids to learn about asteroids.

 Next up is CJ's account ...

According to the event's website, "Asteroid Day" is a global awareness campaign where people from around the world come together to learn about asteroids, the impact hazard they may pose, and what we can do to protect our planet, families, communities, and future generations from future asteroid impacts. Asteroid Day is held each year on the anniversary of the largest impact in recent history, the 1908 Tunguska event in Siberia. The Museum of Flight, a frequent haunt for us, was holding an event for Asteroid Day, which we were looking forward to and visited.

One of the only things I learned at the event was the difference between asteroids (large rocks outside of Earth's atmosphere,) meteoroids (smaller rocks that break off from asteroids,) meteors (an asteroid or meteoroid that enters Earth's atmosphere,) and meteorites (meteors that land on Earth's surface). Otherwise, the event was rather simplistic and disappointing. There were 3 activity stations, only 1 of which I was interested in. One was a simplistic craft station that seemingly had little to do with the event. The second was a sandbox where you could "dig" for fools' gold, which you immediately had to put back in. The last one was a cardboard cutout of Earth suspended from the ceiling, with 4 holes in it. You could take a tinfoil ball that was supposed to look like a soon-to-be meteor, and try and throw it through one of the holes.

I was disappointed by the Museum of Flight's Asteroid Day event.

Ouch.  Hopefully it was more satisfying for the younger children who visited!