Ray of Hope

FINALLY, SOME SUN: We walked around half blind today. Blinded by the light, that is. As in full on sunlight. As in something we haven't had hardly any of since October 1.

We awoke to blue skies, and there was instantly a little extra spring in our steps. So we took some extra steps. Annabelle enjoyed 1.5 hours of a Girls on the Run club she recently joined, and CJ and I took a stroll around the Seattle Pacific University campus. We've driven by and through that campus hundreds of times over the last 10 years, as it's right by our house. But until today, we'd never walked it, if you can believe that. 

We started at this archway. 

Today, we learned it leads to the Tiffany Loop.

We also learned what year SPU was founded. It's carved into one of the bases of the arch.

As we walked around, we came across a story pole we'd only see as part of the 'nearby' map while playing Pokemon Go.

Naturally, we took the time to read the story about the story pole.

We also took the time to size up this enormous tree in the middle of the Tiffany Loop.

And we came across this nifty bike maintenance station. It had a pump next to it and tools hanging from it. What a good idea.

All in all, a pretty little campus, with nothing but brick buildings. We'll definitely stroll through there again some day.

WILD FOR FLOWERS: Yesterday, something about bees, Cheerios, wildflowers and free seeds kept popping up on my Facebook feed. Naturally, we had to check it out.

Turns out Cheerios, in partnership with Vesey's, had pledged to give away 100 million (!) wildflower seeds in a campaign to help #BringBacktheBees.

Why bother? Well, according to the Cheerios site, 1 in 3 bites of food we eat is made possible by bees and other pollinators, and 42% of bee colonies in the U.S. collapsed in 2015.
When I hopped on their site (http://www.cheerios.com/bringbackthebees) yesterday, the meter said they'd already reached their 100 million goal, but it let me enter my data anyway and said some seeds were headed our way.

This evening when I checked again, things were a bit different. ... 

So the bad news is, no more free seeds. The good news is, they are giving away 1.5 BILLION seeds. That's so cool. We can't wait to receive ours! 

They also posted a map of where the seeds are being shipped.

MUD-DAY: I never did post about our Monday. It involved heavy duty physical labor. For six hours. In the frequently pouring rain. 

Demolition, digging, dump runs, all sorts of fun. We were working on improving a school garden alongside a service group of teens and young adults from Oklahoma, believe it or not. There were probably 22 or so of us in all. While it's true many hands make light work, there was major work to be done, so it didn't feel all that light!

We had the added bonus of having a dead battery during the dump run. Good, good times. 

INSPIRING: As part of the social studies club they belong to, the kids are producing profiles of people they admire. Here's CJ's choice ... 

Faster-Than-Light: Meet Miguel Alcubierre

Have you ever dreamed of travelling faster-than-light to other planets, star systems, or even galaxies? Unfortunately, our current space propulsion systems would take far too long to get to far-off places in space. However, one man has a possible solution: Dr. Miguel Alcubierre Moya (better known as Miguel Alcubierre), Director of the Nuclear Sciences Institute at UNAM, is a Mexican theoretical physicist.

Miguel Alcubierre is best known for proposing the Alcubierre Drive in 1994, a theoretical propulsion system that would allow spacecraft to travel faster-than-light.

Miguel Alcubierre was born on 28 March 1964, in Mexico City. In 1988 and 1990, Alcubierre received degrees from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, after which he traveled to Cardiff University, in Wales to attend graduate school. In 1994, Miguel Alcubierre received his Ph.D from Cardiff, through study of numerical general relativity.

Later that year, Dr. Alcubierre wrote “The Warp Drive: Hyper-fast travel within general relativity,” the original article in which he proposed the Alcubierre Drive. The Warp Drive was published in science journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.

In The Warp Drive, Dr. Alcubierre describes the Alcubierre Drive as being a system in which the space in front of a spacecraft is compressed, and the space behind the spacecraft is expanded. The Alcubierre Drive would theoretically let a spacecraft travel at faster-than-light speeds.

In 2012, Dr. Alcubierre was appointed as the Director of the Nuclear Sciences Institute at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). In 2016, Dr. Alcubierre was reappointed.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Alcubierre

http://www.andersoninstitute.com/alcubierre-warp-drive.html

Pi, Pie, Pi, Pie!

PI-PALOOZA: It's Pi Day, that super special day of the year where you eat nothing but pie for a whole day, at least if you are hanging out with Magnolia Preparatory Academy folks.

Pi day, is, of course, really all about that beloved irrational number, an infinite decimal that starts with 3.14, hence Pi Day being March 14. 

The kids started their day off 'right' with apple pie for breakfast. We did not bake it, we scored it on sale for just $1.50 from a local grocery store. 

Lunch was pizza pie, which they shared during their Dungeons and Dragons club meeting today at noon. 

Dinner was a bit of a project. We made two gluten-free chicken pot pies. 

Making pot pie is a lot of work. We had to cube and cook chicken. We had to make chicken broth. We had to cut up onions and brown them. We had to peel, dice and boil potatoes. 

We had to get carrots, peas and green beans ready. We had to combine it all with some milk and cornstarch to make the filling.

Making the gluten free pie crust was the real challenge. I'm not great at pie crusts to begin with, Turns out that's also true of the offspring helping today. ...

CJ cracked eggs under the watchful eye of birthday boy Albert Einstein.

 We cut in butter and made disks of dough.

 Rolling out the first pair of crusts went well enough. 

Unfortunately, the second pair was pretty much a disaster, as someone blew right by the part of the instructions that say to add water one tablespoon at a time to the flour, salt, butter mix. The dough was waaaay too sticky. More than adding a bunch more flour could really fix. 

We par baked the bottom shells and filled them, adding a few crunchy onions for fun before topping them with our sloppy pie crust. 

The photos at the top of the post were of our pasty looking pre-baked pie. I guess I forgot to take photos of it fresh from the oven.

While it was a lot of work and the pie crust got the best of us, it was worth it, I guess. The pie was delicious. 

Tomorrow, we'll actually do some non-cooking related math. And eat healthier. :)

FLASHBACK: Thought I'd take this opportunity, Einstein's birthday, to share a favorite project from the past. CJ wrote this poem about Einstein as part of an Einsteinian physics class we took back in 2013. 

Long Live the King

HE'S BACK: Yesterday, the kids were happy to have older brother Kennedy take the time to take them to a matinee. 

They chose to see a good ol' monster matinee. Specifically, "Kong: Skull Island," because after 84 years, there still can't be enough King Kong reboots.  

I'll let Annabelle tell you a bit about the movie first. Warning: Spoiler alerts ahead. ... 
Kong: Skull Island is a movie about a scientist (whose name I never found out) who believes in monsters such as Kong. He asks his governor to let him go on a “geographical” research mission to Skull Island, an island mysteriously surrounded by storm clouds all the time for some reason that is never explained. The governor grants him permission and sends military backup, per request. This island turns out to be filled with giant creatures and, you guessed it, Kong is one of them! The army general (who I strongly dislike) decides the best way to land on this island with this presumably peaceful creature is to begin shooting it in the face. Needless to say, 80% of the fleet goes down, with the other 20% containing our main characters- photographer girl, tracker guy, scientist dude, and army general (I have no idea what these character’s names are, which shows you a little about the film).
After Kong swiftly punches away many of our main character’s reinforcements, there are two groups left: Main characters and the army general with about 5 troops. These two groups promptly split up and both find themselves discovering crazy things about this island. The army group finds more scary giant creatures (I.E. a giant bamboo spider who impaled a dude with its leg) and decide to shoot them, again. Meanwhile, our main characters discover a peaceful giant water buffalo thing. They decide not to shoot it, and continue on to find a tribe of people who have been living on the island, led by a man from WW2 who’s been there for about 20 years as of the movie’s events. He tells them about how Kong is King of the island, and the tribal people consider him a god and protector because he fights off the other giant creatures that actually want to hurt people. WW2 survivor joins the main characters’ group on their way to a point where helicopters can rescue them.
Overall, the movie contains a lot of graphic violence and special effects, usually paired together. I wouldn’t go if you’re expecting to see King Kong scaling the Empire State Building, because the movie stays on the island and doesn’t even remotely focus on Kong alone. It’s a good movie if you’re into giant CGI monsters, violence, and giant CGI monster violence.

No surprise, CJ had to weigh in, as well.

I wish I just saw Shin Godzilla.

This afternoon, my older brother Ken took my sister and I to see Kong: Skull Island, the second installment in Legendary Pictures' Monsterverse series (starting with Godzilla 2014). A few months earlier, I had seen Shin Godzilla, a superior, Japanese-made kaiju film, from its limited theater release in October.
Here's my review of Skull Island:

Kong: Skull Island is a reboot of the King Kong film series, which started with the original King Kong in 1933. Skull Island is primarily set around a group of people visiting the titular island to see King Kong in 1973, near the end of the Vietnam War.
Hoo boy. This is where things start declining:

For starters, there are far too many monsters. While Shin Godzilla had just one monster, and made it a very interesting and well-designed kaiju, Kong: Skull Island uses several poorly-developed and explored kaiju throughout its 2-hour runtime, weakening the audience's interest in the beasts. Second off, while the special effects were evidently well-funded and well done, there's a certain sense of charmlessness that comes with using high-budget special effects and CGI in kaiju films. Contrast Shin Godzilla, which, while it made use of CGI, also opted to use some practical effects (if I remember correctly).

Personally, my biggest issue with Skull Island has to be the film's omnipresent gore (no, not the man who should've became President in 2000). Throughout most of Skull Island, seeing large amounts of graphic violence (such as King Kong ripping the tongue and internal organs out of one monster) does not help one's appetite. A character is impaled vertically through their body, and there are several other bloody character deaths throughout the film.

While Skull Island might be an entertaining way to spend two hours munching popcorn (if you're okay with nauseating graphic violence), it probably won't win any Oscars, and is inferior to Shin Godzilla.