Check Up

GROWING WELL: Thought it was about  time to check in with our garlic plant project. You may recall, back on January 15, we planted some sprouting garlic cloves for the fun of it. The 'before' photo is below. 

Fast forward a week and a day, and you can see the garlic seems to be happy so far, especially that one stem of green that's risen well above the planter. I might just have to harvest some for our stir fry tonight! 

ART UPDATE: This afternoon, Annabelle put a new art kit she was gifted for Christmas to work. She was happy to see it had watercolor pencils. I'd not heard of those before. You color with them like 'normal' colored pencils, but then you can blend the colors with water, like watercolor paints, in a way. 

That's what she did on the "You" below. I think it's pretty pretty.

Speaking of art, we continued our "How to Draw" class today via Great Courses. Today's lecture was a little bit about ways of drawing (observation, construction and abstract), and a fair amount about how lines are used together to compose a drawing. We had a couple of really helpful exercises employing phantom drawing, which is a technique where you make strokes above or very lightly on your paper before actually committing to drawing that linear or curved line. Why have I not done this before?! It sure would have saved a lot of erasers over the years. ...

Our professor, David Brody, MFA, of the University of Washington, also talked about how to view others' artwork, and how 'active analysis' where you ask 'how did they do that?" and so on is important. I said to Annabelle, "So, when do you and I often do that?" 

She immediately responded with what I had in mind. "When we're looking at other people's cakes. We talk about how they did it, what we like, what we'd do differently," Annabelle described.

The rest of today's lecture was kind of a syllabus for the course. Yowza, it's super comprehensive. He said the material covered would take about four quarters of a standard college course. So it looks like you'll be hearing about "How to Draw" for months to come. 

DARK SIDE OF THE MOON: We've seen headlines the last couple of days about new photos from the far side of the moon, taken by their Chang'e-4 lunar lander.

You can visit the Chinese website with all of the images here: http://moon.bao.ac.cn/pubMsg/detail-CE4EN.jsp#

Just an FYI: The site is *really* slow to load and I was unable to download any of their images, which maybe is a good thing ...

You're probably best off going to Doug Ellison's website, where he has downloaded and processed many of the images, including this one, where you can see the tracks from the rover where it left the lander. (Ellison is the engineering camera team lead for the Curiosity Mars Rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.)

For a fullscreen slideshow of Ellison's work with the images, follow this link:
https://dougellison.smugmug.com/frame/slideshow?key=fPwwkL&autoStart=1&captions=0&navigation=0&playButton=0&randomize=0&speed=3&transition=fade&transitionSpeed=2&clickable=1

Brick Layers

CAKE DAY:  Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. day, and it has become a day where people are encouraged to make it a day of volunteering, instead of just a day off of work or school.  

We definitely did not take Monday off. Instead, we were busy building a cake for Birthday Dreams, a local non-profit who provides birthday parties to kids in homeless shelters.

The child we were making the cake for had requested a LEGO theme, if possible.

Naturally, our first step was hopping online and Googling "LEGO cake." There are thousands of examples to check out. One idea we liked was adding a LEGO character head as the cake topper. We eventually landed on the first tier featuring a LEGO-like wall on the front, and that the cake would feature candy melt bricks that we would make. 

Below, the first tier (vanilla, per the birthday boy's request) is a blank slate, awaiting some fun while Annabelle designs the birthday boy's name in the LEGO font. We'd later cut that out of sugar sheets. (It's obscured in the photo atop this post, for anonymity reasons). 

We built the head first. The topper is actually an enormous Rice Krispies treat. we used little 6-inch cake pans to make the bulk of the head, and a smaller cylinder to serve as the peg atop his head, and the neck. We made our fondant, colored it bright yellow, rolled it out, and draped the shape. That's always a bit of a dicey process. Fortunately, it was a good batch of fondant, and the draping went pretty darn well.

Next up was putting the face on. Annabelle cut the mouth, eyes and eyebrows out of Sugar Sheets! (a Wilton product), and we affixed them on the fondant with a product called Dab-n-Hold. 

We made dozens of "LEGO" bricks by melting candy melt in the microwave, and carefully pouring it into silicone molds. The bricks formed the bottom border of our first tier, and we put some on top of the cake, as well.  We also had to make flat bricks for the cake front. Those were just colored fondant, cut into different sizes and then affixed to the front.

We'd never made a LEGO-inspired cake before, so it was all new to us. It was a fun process and within our skill set, at this point. We sure hope the birthday boy liked it!

Right after completing our LEGO cake, we learned that LEGO company is set to launch an International Space Station LEGO set in February. That looks like a fun build, too, with a lot less sugar than our LEGO project. ;)
https://www.space.com/lego-international-space-station-set-launches-february-2020.html?utm_source=notification

PERFECT DISASTER:  This weekend, activity at the Space Coast had some of our attention. SpaceX was set to launch an important test flight, a major and nearly final milestone before they can actually start carrying real live astronauts on board their Dragon capsule. The goal of the mission was mission to show the spacecraft’s capability to safely separate from the rocket in the unlikely event of an inflight emergency.

           Image: NASA Television

The launch was supposed to happen Saturday, but weather scuttled that. Sunday morning was a go, however, and as we worked around the house, we listened to the post-launch press conference.

I have to say, it was a bit of a change watching a rocket launch and hoping the thing blows up. But the whole point of the exercise was to see if the Dragon could safely escape such a catastrophe. Happy to say, it did. 

After the successful demonstration, NASA administrator Jim Bridestine said, “This critical flight test puts us on the cusp of returning the capability to launch astronauts in American spacecraft on American rockets from American soil."

SpaceX founder and chief engineer was equally pleased with the test results. “As far as we can tell thus far, it’s a picture perfect mission. It went as well as one can possibly expect,” said Musk. “This is a reflection of the dedication and hard work of the SpaceX and NASA teams to achieve this goal. Obviously, I’m super fired up. This is great.”

What next? Those in the know say a second quarter 2020 flight of Dragon with a pair of astronauts on board is likely. That will be a momentous occasion, to be sure.

You can watch the test events here ...