Fine Finds

BOOKISH:  We had a great afternoon at a local Goodwill store yesterday. Check out this haul (above).

The store had rearranged their book section and instead of finding ourselves in the children's section, we were standing by the humor shelf. Turned out to be a boon. We picked up multiple books from The Onion, one of the most irreverent online sources of  "news."  Their "Our Dumb World" actually contains hundreds of interesting-and-odd factoids about places on Earth, written with humor that is right up CJ's alley, especially.

Annabelle spotted the book version of one of her favorite web-based humorists, Allie Brosh of Hyperbole and a Half.

And last but not least, on a random shelf completely out of place we spied a young adult novel by astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and his daughter, Lucy! "George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt" is one of four books the Hawkings have worked on together.

BOWIE BOUND FOR SPACE: An email from NASA certainly got our attention this afternoon.  The press release contained an invitation for "all space enthusiasts to send their artistic endeavors on a journey aboard NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft."

OSIRIS-REx will be the first U.S. mission to collect a sample of an asteroid and return it to Earth for study. It's scheduled to launch in September and travel to the asteroid Bennu. They are accepting sketches, photographs, graphics, poems, songs, short videos or other creative or artistic expression that reflects what it means to be an explorer. Submitted works of art will be saved on a chip on the spacecraft.

Immediately, the kids and I thought it would be perfect to send a photo of the beaded David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust for a ride. 

Daughter's #Bowie is spacebound! Fitting tribute to a pioneering, star-loving musician @OSIRISREx #WeTheExplorers pic.twitter.com/UuoQ3DlnYW

— Kristine Kisky (@KristineKisky) February 19, 2016

Thanks to NASA's 2014 “Messages to Bennu” campaign, our names are already onboard OSIRIS-REx, along with 442,000 other virtual adventurers!

 

YODA YOGA: Looking to shake up the exercise routine a bit, I did a quick search of YouTube for some kids' yoga programs and almost immediately landed on "Star Wars -  A Cosmic Kids Yoga Adventure!" How could I pass that up?

Turns out it was quite a fortuitous find. Truth be told, I was totally afraid the video was going to be completely corny, but the yoga teacher actually did a respectable job telling the original ("New Hope") Star Wars story while putting us through the paces. 

Lessons Learned

WALK-IN TALL:  This morning, we headed down the hill (Magnolia), through the valley (Interbay) and up the hill (Queen Anne). Not an arduous jaunt - about seven minutes in all. Our destination - a "walk in" (as opposed to a walk out or a sit in).

On board were a couple dozen lil' banana-zucchini bread owls. We whipped them up last night, because nothing says FUND OUR SCHOOLS like banana-zucchini bread, right?! 

The civics exercise was a (very small) part of a statewide effort to send a (very loud) message to the Washington state legislature to fund K-12 education. As outlined by our state's constitution, Article IX, specifically: "It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex."

The problem is, the legislature isn't doing its job, not by a long shot. In fact, they're in contempt of the state supreme court, and have been for a long while at this point. In fact, since last August, the court ordered the state to pay penalties of $100,000 PER DAY for, in effect, dereliction of duty.  It's disgraceful, really. Public schools are slipping ever deeper into categories of "haves" and "have nots" as school budgets are met by well monied local or special interests rather than state-wide support. 

We're only at a local public school about four hours a week, but with two sons in the education game as teachers, and as someone who went to public schools K-12, I'm a huge supporter. So we baked banana-zucchini owls. :)

And colored on posters which were delivered to Olympia later in the day.

 CJ wrote = FOR ALL in the lower corner of the poster below. I appreciated the fact he first wrote L-L-A backward, on the low line, so he could properly space the word and symbol above it. :)  A future engineer, perhaps? 

By the way, if you haven't already, go back up above and spot the owl missing its beak. (And in case you're wondering the beaks were little marshmallow wedges painted with food coloring.)

PEMDAS: As we worked on math this morning, part of which involved knowing the proper operational order of solving an equation, Annabelle offhandedly shared with CJ and me that there was a great TED-Ed video on the topic involving a dragon.

Intrigued, we dialed it up on YouTube and learned about the six musketeers of math, PEMDAS, an acronym for parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, the order in which you work a problem. Check it out here: https://youtu.be/H6syI3xiBBg


IT'S A GAS: This afternoon when CJ and Annabelle were practicing guitar, they were at an impasse about what song to play next, I suggested "Classical Gas" and was met with two blank stares. 

Thanks to the magic of the Internet, we dialed it up  (Mason Williams' hit version) and they got to hear it for the first time (and I heard it for the first time in like 40 years!).

As we listened, we talked about what we were hearing. ... Flamenco or Spanish guitar. Sounds like a Spaghetti Western soundtrack or "The Prisoner" theme, horns a la Herb Alpert, James Bond-ish.

All of those are legit labels, I think, especially given the song's time. It was 1968 when it hit number two on the Billboard charts.

Playing Catch Up

STILL HERE: We've been busy here the past few days, but you wouldn't know it by our posts (or lack thereof). I've had some weird stupid cold thing that has left me wiped out in the evenings when I usually post to the blog. 

This weekend we knocked a number of things off our 'to do' list around the homestead, and then Sunday night the kids whipped up an extra large chocolate chip cookie for Valentine's Day!

We've played games, including one called "Reading Between the Lines," where game players had to solve reading comprehension problems to progress. 

We've taken the dogs for multiple walks, including down to the waterfront, and to Meridian Park. At the latter, we enjoyed the gazebo, and a large playground with art all around.

We watched most of the 140th Westminster Kennel Club competition on Monday and Tuesday nights (much to Kirby and Laika's chagrin. They barked repeatedly at the competition, so to speak). Imagine our surprise and delight when the dog show finalists were announced and among them were a bulldog named Annabelle and German shorthair pointer named CJ!

As soon as I saw CJ win the working class, I predicted to the kids the dog would take best of show honors. He was such a beauty!  Congratulations, CJ (and better luck next year, Annabelle).

YOUNG WILLIAM: We'll be checking out William Shakespeare's "First Folio" here when it visits Seattle, and so we're learning a bit more about the author's life and times.

We started with a four-part documentary called "In Search of Shakespeare," which aired on PBS over a decade ago. 

I'll let the kids tell you a bit about what we learned today. ... 

CJ goes first ... 

William Shakespeare was an iconic English playwright whose writings significantly influenced theater as we know it. I recently watched the first part of a 4-part documentary miniseries called "In Search of Shakespeare" by the BBC. It was hosted by a man named Michael Wood, and the first episode is about Shakespeare's life up to the age of 19.

Shakespeare's father was a wealthy illegal wool dealer who made a name for himself in the countryside. His son, William Shakespeare, was able to get an education, a luxury that many children did not have. Shakespeare acted in his school's plays, which got him interested in theater. However, William's family was Catholic, in a time when England's royal family had recently changed the national religion to Protestantism. It became a sin to go to Catholic church, and when William was about 14, the wool industry went into a recession, which heavily affected his family. Shakespeare eventually got married, at age 19, but soon afterward, things went very badly for his family. One of his cousins declared in public that he was going to kill the queen, and the queen's spies noticed this. As a result, Shakespeare's aunt and uncle were tortured and executed, and the same would have happened to his cousin had he not committed suicide.

I look forward to seeing the next parts of the miniseries and learning how he wrote the plays he is known for.

And here's what Annabelle had to share ...

I recently watched a documentary called “In Search of Shakespeare” that talks about the mysteries of Shakespeare’s life. Many people know about Shakespeare’s career as a playwright, but did you know his childhood wasn’t that great? He had a good education until his father’s business of glove-making suddenly dropped. His father was also, at some point, mayor of Shakespeare’s childhood town. His family got in serious trouble after his cousin (on his mom’s side) allegedly said he would go to London and kill the queen. This lead to many of his family members being imprisoned and tortured. He also was a Catholic, even though the national religion was changed multiple times and eventually, going to his church was considered a sin. He even had a priest who you would only go to if you were in a hurry or wanted a more Catholic wedding marry him and Anne Hathaway. This was only his teenage years, and I can’t wait to see the next part and what other mysteries might unfold! 

Nice that the PBS Web site has an educators' guide to the show: http://www.pbs.org/shakespeare/educators/