Apollo Revisited

FLIGHTY: Friday evening, Annabelle had a class at The Museum of Flight. As were readying to take her, it occurred to me I was tired of just dropping her off there for various activities, and that it had been way too long since we paid the place a visit. So, off we went, if only for an hour or so.

I especially wanted to see the museum's revamped Apollo exhibit. This vignette at its entrance made me fee right at home!

Video from the Apollo 11 moon landing was playing 'live' on the TV screen. This Cronkite quote on the wall made me chuckle. 

One of the biggest parts of the exhibit - literally - is a old F-1 engine. It dwarfed the kids.

 Back in the day, five of these would have been mounted on the rocket.

While the engine above never left Earth, other artifacts on display sure did. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his team, who found them on the ocean floor.

 This F-1 definitely looks a little worse for the wear, having spent more than 40 years at sea.

 And below is a hypergolic manifold that played a role in the Apollo 12 mission.

All in all, it was an impressive display. If I were queen, though, I'd have the space not quite so dark, and the glass covering the artifacts not quite so reflective. It's kind of a photographer's nightmare in there.

 After hours, Annabelle attended a class at the museum. I'll let her tell you more about it. ...

At the Museum of Flight, I recently took a 3D modeling class with the Amelia’s Aero Club group. The class was 2 hours long and focused around learning to use TinkerCAD, a 3D modeling program which I’ve had experience with before at the Living Computer Museum + Labs. The program uses simple shapes and bright colors to make 3D modeling accessible to almost everyone. It can take a little while to get used to more advanced features like merging shapes and aligning them, but the learning curve in general is very small. The two projects we made during the class were a small warm-up rocket consisting of 4 shapes, and for the main project a larger airplane that we got to customize at the end. The class had a few difficulties connecting to the internet, being in a concrete room, but most of the time the program ran smoothly. Since I was already familiar with TinkerCAD, I was able to keep up with our instructor rather quickly. It seemed like other students were doing well even if they had never used TinkerCAD before.

ANT INVASION: We are in charge of a monthly birthday bulletin board. Below is what we came up with for March. We were trying to think of something spring-y, but weren't feeling any of the rain or flower ideas. We thought briefly about bees and ladybugs, but decided it was too early for that. I said, "What about ants?" as they've already started showing up around our place. 

So an ant farm it was.  I love Annabelle's little ants - they have so much personality! CJ helped cut them and the ant farm out.

The ant farm vignettes included a music room, a movie theater, an art gallery (complete with MonAnt Lisa and Antmerican Gothic, a ballet studio, a library, and, of course, ants have to have a picnic.

 Annabelle said it was fun drawing creatures with four arms for a change.