AD ASTRA: Sad news this morning. Humankind has lost a great one, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first person to ever complete an extravehicular activity (spacewalk). We had the absolute pleasure of seeing him in person in September of 2012, during a Museum of Flight event. He told an absolutely captivating account of his spacewalk. What an experience that was! That day Leonov also shared an emotional account of his close friend Yuri Gagarin's death, and how Gagarin was unfairly blamed for the accident. Above is a photo I took of him (and his daughter, who translated for him) on that fantastic occasion. In addition to being an astronaut, Leonov was a diplomat, a writer and an artist. Note: Yes, I see that his name is spelled Alexey on the placard above, but everywhere else I've seen it, it's Alexei, so not sure what was up with that. SEEING IS BELIEVING: Presently via CJ's psychology course, we're learning about how our senses affect us. Recently, we've watched two really interesting videos about individuals who see using input other than their eyes. First, we watched a short video about a gentleman who uses a device on his tongue to help visually interpret the world around him. As he explains near the start of the video, "Your brain is what sees, not your eyes." Check out this video about the Brainport Vision Device. It's pretty remarkable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNkw28fz9u0&list=PLAC1C3F4A365958A8&index=6&t=5s We also viewed an episode from the series "Extraordinary People" about Ben Underwood, a boy who lost his eyesight to cancer as a toddler. Underwood managed to develop a way to 'see' using echolocation. It's fascinating. (The episode can be seen here: https://archive.org/details/youtube-TB_yrWppP0c.) The show was filmed 12 years ago, when Underwood was 14. We were curious how he was doing now. I pictured him touring from city to city, as a motivational speaker and teacher of his echolocation method. I suggested CJ Google "Ben Underwood echolocation." About 10 seconds later, CJ reported devastating news. Just two years after the episode aired, the cancer that stole young Underwood's eyesight ended up killing him. We all felt so sad upon hearing this, and kinda wished we weren't so darn curious by nature. Here's a short Sacramento Bee video, narrated by his mother, about Ben's life. In 2014 her book about Ben, "Echoes on an Angel," was released.
SING SONG: We continue to try to learn hiragana, characters used in Japanese writing. CJ's professor suggested a couple of videos, including this one. ...
Watching it, I asked, "Why does she have to sing it so damn fast?" I mean, if you're a beginner, speed is not your friend. Then there is this version. It kind of sounds like a club remix song.
I do think this song is more manageable and might help a bit, so we'll be listening to it some more.
PROXY CAKE: On Monday, our main focus was completing a birthday cake for Rick's birthday - kind of. Rick lives in Vegas now, so he wouldn't be tasting, or even seeing in person, the cake we were making for him. However, as regular readers know, we like to donate cakes to kids in local homeless shelters via one of our favorite charities, Birthday Dreams. So, we went on their website and chose the cake request we thought Rick would like best if he were still a little boy. When I saw a youngster wanted a superhero cake, I knew that was the one we had to do for Rick. he was all about super hero action figures when he was young. We decided to incorporate elements of the Big Three into the cake. We covered the cake board in red fondant and carved a spider web into it as a nod to Spider-Man. The cake's bottom layer was vanilla cake covered in buttercream tinted silver and decked out Batman style. The top 'cake' layer was actually a giant Krispies treat covered in homemade marshmallow fondant. For both layers, the e belts are from fondant we made, the capes are sculpted from modeling chocolate we made, as are the cake toppers. The logos are cut from from a sugar sheets. We also put the cake recipient's name on the cake board, but left it off for confidentiality reasons prior to this photo. With every cake we donate, I make up a little cake tutorial, so whoever is serving it knows what's what ingredient wise, as well as what's hiding inside structurally.
This cake was a fun one. We hope both boys (Rick and the young recipient) liked it! JARRING: Tuesday night we *finally* got around to jarring the honey we extracted from a couple of our hive's frames last week. The bowl below shows how much our 'haul' was (9 ounce bear jar for scale).
We are lucky that there's a jar wholesaler down in the Sodo district of Seattle, which is conveniently located for us. We went there a couple days back and scored some honeycomb shaped jars at a reasonable price. We scooped the honey out of the bowl and let it stream into the jars.
It wasn't the quickest process, but it was relaxing in a way.
It's kind of mesmerizing watching the honey slowly run into the vessels.
We were very careful while filling the jars, not wanting to waste a single, precious drop of the special stuff!
TEST KITCHEN: The fourth Saturday of most every month, we help serve dinner at a shelter for homeless young adults and teens. This month the service will be close to Halloween, so we pitched a sorta spooky menu including "Halloweenies" (mummy wrapped hot dogs) and screaming beans (spicy baked beans). Tuesday night, we gave a couple of recipes a test run.
We were mostly happy with them. You have to love the Instant Pot pressure cooker. You can go from dry beans to this (below) in about two hours. Remarkable!
SOMETHING TO CHEW ON: The headline was one you don't see every day. The tease notification from Space.com read, "Meat Grown in Space for the First Time Ever." I had to click on that. On October 7, Aleph Farms, an Israeli food company, announced that its experiment aboard the International Space Station resulted in the first-ever lab-grown meat in space. Here's a Roscosmos photo of the cosmonaut with the space meat.
The company grows lab "cultivated beef steaks," which is an entire piece edible meat from just a couple of cells. On the ISS a 3D bioprinter was used. In the contraption, "animal cells, are mixed with growth factors and the material 'bioink,' and 'printed' into a layered structure," per Space,com's article. No mention of whether the meat was eaten and how it tastes. The article's subhead did note, however, that the cultivated meat is "slaughter-free." That's something to think about.
TIS THE SEASON: Fall is definitely in the air, with cool nights and spiders everywhere. Dozens of little green tomatoes are hanging on for dear life, and we harvested all of our spaghetti squash this weekend. It was a bumper crop of squash - over a dozen in total, I do believe, all from just a couple of tiny seeds. Hard to believe! WORK IN PROGRESS: A busy weekend around here. Work on our basement continues, and I'm happy to report we have all of the new flooring installed. Hooray! Meanwhile, upstairs work has included a cake donation project for Birthday Dreams. Can you guess its theme?
COLLEGE UPDATE: Week two of college is in the books for CJ and he seems to have hit his stride, doing well on written assignments and tests. Speaking of tests, while he didn't ace his first week of history, this week was a different story, thanks to an improved approach. In addition to taking notes while he read the textbook chapters, we discovered a website called Quizlet. There, you can find flashcard and other types of quizzes for most any textbook. It's amazing - and it's free! Quizlet purports to have over 300 million (!) study sets online, and reports more than 50 million users from over 130 countries each month. Fortunately, it has tests for the text CJ is using for history. He used the flashcards to prep, and it really worked. He scored 100 percent with relative ease this go round, so hooray for that! SO FAR, SO GOOD: Annabelle has managed to complete a drawing for each day of InkTober so far. Here are three of her latest creations. The prompt for the one below was "Freeze."
The self-constructing robot was drawn for the theme "Build."
