Crafts and Cards

FUN WITH FOAM: Each month, we post a bulletin board at a local school. Its purpose is to feature students' birthdays for the month, and each month, we try to come up with something a little different

It's now officially winter, but instead of hitting upon the obvious snowy theme, we thought it would be fun to picture what some critters usually pictured in snow would be doing, given their druthers. And so, the idea for "Penguin Vacation" was hatched.

The penguins and many of the elements (surf boards, a shark, and such) are made from craft foam. The rest is mixed media, everything from paper bags to printed card stock to produce netting, paper towels to Popsicle sticks.

We had fun thinking about penguins building sand castles, surfing, playing beach volleball, tanning (or burning) and even bellying up to a tiki bar.

In our case, it was a smelt smoothies bar (forgive the blurry, bad cell phone photo. Sorry!)
I loved Annabelle's little tinfoil smelt tails coming out of foam cups!

GAMERS: We've been playing a lot of card and board games lately thanks, in part, to Christmas gifts received.

One game new to us is CardLine Dinosuars.

The challenge is to take the cards you're dealt and take turns playing them according to what you guess their weight or size to be.

It's fun and educational.

Tonight, we revisited an old favorite, Hanabi. 

    Photo: By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43516906

MEANWHILE ON JUPITER: My social media feeds were full of this astounding photo of Jupiter's surface.

Taken by the space probe Juno  on Dec. 16, 2017 at 9:43 a.m. PST  the image of colorful, dynamic clouds in Jupiter’s northern hemisphere. It was photographed 8,292 miles (13,345 kilometers) above the tops of Jupiter’s clouds, at a latitude of 48.9 degrees.

It's worth noting the spatial scale in this image is 5.8 miles per pixel (9.3 kilometers/pixel). Take a minute to think about that. Jupiter is enormous.

Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran processed this image using data from the JunoCam imager."

If you want to see more, JunoCam's raw images are available for the public to peruse and process into image products at: www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam