Connecting

PREPPING: While the world has seemingly changed so much in the last month, some things have not changed. One thing that remains the same is there are still homeless teens here in Seattle, and they need nutrition. Therefore, we are, of course, still heading up a monthly meal for Teen Feed.

I've started using Meal Train's potluck feature to publish the monthly meal asks. Here's what I published this month. ...

Message to Participants 

This go 'round is going to be quite a bit different, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We must take measures to protect ourselves, our guests, and the community. Service will be 'curbside' or to go this month. 

Because of the pandemic, only one family will be in kitchen, assembling the burritos into boxes, which will be distributed outside, in the alley, by Teen Feed staffers. 

Wonderful volunteers, please have all food to Teen Feed by 5:50 p.m., in a container you can leave behind. You will be dropping the food at the Teen Feed door. If you're bringing rice, beans or chicken, please bring them hot, to save the skeleton crew/inside team from more work having to heat it up. 

***I would advise you to buy your food earlier than usual because of the runs on grocery store inventory :( *** 

News straight from Teen Feed: "The kitchen crews will now have limited exposure to youth. Our youth will be temporarily served by staff and volunteers at doorways and eat outside in well-ventilated areas. We’re also suggesting simplifying your warm meals to allow for fewer cooks and social distancing. We have increased reverse ventilation, are bleaching and hand-washing, and we are confident we are limiting exposure in a responsible way."

I sent that notice out a couple of weeks ago, along with an itemized list of food wishes (you can see it here: https://mealtrain.com/4lw7k8 )

Today, still in containment in the basement, I managed to made some crispy rice dessert bars. (Awhile back we found strawberry Rice Krispies at Grocery Outlet and I bought them with Teen Feed desserts in mind.) Tomorrow we'll be making copious amounts of beans and chicken for the big burritos to go. 

We typically prep on site, stage a buffet line and serve our dine in guests, but tomorrow will be different. Here's hoping this delivery model goes well. I have to think next month will be to go, too. This virus isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

SING IT: This afternoon I got kind of a last minute notice about a distant Fridays @the 5th (Avenue Theater). The kids particpated last Friday, when the session features Broadway's Don Darryl Rivera (Disney's Aladdin; Sancho Panza in The 5th's Don Quixote). Rivera talked about the importance comic relief in uncertain times.

This week, the program featured Seattlite Sarah Rose Davis. She led a session called "Raise Your Voice: Powerful Music Calls for Powerful (healthy) Singing!" 

I could hear bits of the broadcast from upstairs, but don't have the kids' reviews yet. Stay tuned. 

COOL DEAL: This morning, a post to a Facebook group I follow let me know about writing workshops for teenagers from Seattle-based Clarion West, a nonprofit literary organization. 

Surprisingly, I'd never heard of them before. I followed the link and read up on the offerings. They included ... 

Writing Sprint: Writing Exercises - a series of four stand alone classes.
These weekly sessions are for writers who want to build a regular writing practice or find creative inspiration for generating new stories. Each session you’ll get a set of writing prompts based on The Picture Game. The first exercise we’ll do together and share the results (IF you want to). The rest are yours to do between sessions. All the exercises are designed to allow you to play around with craft and character and setting while planting story seeds in your brain. Even if you already have stories or novels in progress, you can use these exercises to kick your brain into creative gear without pressure and get into the habit of practicing regularly. In partnership with Writing the Other.

Also, she's signed up for a multi-session seminar, The First Time Teen Programming, with Elizabeth Hand

The act of writing is a powerful tool that can help us create a vision of a new and different world, and provide a sense of control when the real world suddenly seems unfamiliar. In this workshop, we’ll use material from out own lives as the basis for a short story. We’ll share and read aloud brief, written, non-fiction accounts of the first time we confronted something new and strange — it could be a relationship, a place, an emotion, a pet, anything at all. Then we will transform that piece of non-fiction into a short SF/F story, which we’ll read aloud and share. Participants will read aloud from their own work and use in-class writing prompts to create their own fiction.

We also signed her up for a one-time class, Building Better Monsters Teen Programming, with James Sutter

Whether magical beasts or intelligent aliens, monsters are at the heart of science fiction and fantasy. But how do you move beyond the classics and come up with your own unique creatures and alien cultures? In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to use evolutionary principles like natural selection and adaptation to jumpstart your creativity, fitting imagined creatures into your setting or creating fascinating new monsters in just minutes!

These sound like such wonderful opportunities - and it's free! How fantastic is that? 

(In case you're wondering, we didn't sign CJ up because he's got another full load of college classes starting soon.)

Opening Stay

BASEBALL: About noon today, a reminder popped up on my computer screen. ... 

I feel like I've been pretty stoic about the whole stay home/self-quarantine/pandemic thing, but this one hurts.

Oh, how I wish we were at the ballpark today. Instead, we're on day-I've-lost-count of isolation.

There will be no crack of the bat, no roar of the crowd. No peanuts. No Cracker Jack. No booing the umpires and rooting for the home team. We won't stretch in the middle of the 7th inning, and won't dance to Louie Louie right after. Damn you, coronavirus!

Never again will I take for granted the opportunity to sit in the stadium and watch the Mariners lose. ;)

Today, instead of sitting at the ballpark with the family and the fans, I was isolated in my basement, listening to a re-run of Felix Hernandez's perfect game, making and mailing out pandemic masks I've sewn while quarantined.

Sometimes the world turns on a dime.

To try to make lemonade out of these lemons, we went ahead and had Venezuelan hot dogs for dinner and a side of garlic fries (a stadium favorite). We had peanuts and sodas and pseudo Cracker Jack and upstairs they watched "Field of Dreams" (which the kids had never seen). 

Another way to scratch that baseball itch? Check out Ken Burns' epic documentary "Baseball." Due to the dearth of the sport in the face of pandemic, Burns asked PBS to stream it for free online. You can check it out here: https://www.pbs.org/show/baseball/

Honestly, even if you're not a big baseball fan, it's worth a watch. As the PBS site points out, "The story of Baseball is the story of America. It is an epic overflowing with heroes and hopefuls, scoundrels and screwballs. It is a saga spanning the quest for racial justice, the clash of labor and management, the transformation of popular culture, and the unfolding of the national pastime."

Good stuff. 

VERSION 2.0: The kids took their first crack at stop motion animation yesterday. Today, I challenged them to try to improve on their fledgling effort. For example, pay attention to what's in your background/scene. I reminded the kids how before I take a staged photo, I'm constantly looking in the background and moving things that are a distraction, or changing my shooting angle to crop things out.

I also asked them if they could incorporate any sound or special effects.

And last but not least, I told CJ we shouldn't see his hand in the movie, lol. Here's his improved version. ...

And here's Annabelle's jazzed up version, complete with a second character and a soundtrack. 

DRAWN IN: The kids drew along with another JJK (author and illustrator Jarrett J. Krosoczka) tutorial today. The topic was having multiple characters in one frame.

The kids decided to draw our dogs.

I've always loved the way CJ depicts the fur on the dogs.

And here's Annabelle's take on the dogs.

VIRTUAL FIELD TRIP: We're certainly not going to Texas anytime soon, but today the family took a virtual field trip to the Johnson Space Center. 

Here's now NASA describes the video: 

Join Boeing and Discovery Education on a mission to inspire the world through aerospace innovation with an exclusive virtual field trip to historic Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. This behind-the-scenes tour will introduce students to just a few of the amazing Boeing employees who are preparing to write the next chapter of space history with the launch of the Starliner/CST-100 spacecraft and the deployment of the Space Launch System (SLS). 

This virtual field trip will explore a variety of unexpected roles and functions that lend to the development of complex projects, like the Starliner/CST-100 and the SLS. Along the way, students will be exposed to the unusual paths that have led to these unique careers.

What Day is It?

MAS MASKS: I'm feeling much better and am able to stay away all day, so I can get things done down here in the basement. Today, that meant mass mask production. 

I made Mariners masks and Seahawks masks and even some rainbow unicorn masks.

STOP IT: The kids' work today included Japanese, of course. Instead of the standard art lessons as of late, I encouraged them to each make a stop motion movie for their first time ever. 

I pointed them to the resources on Coyote Central's page. They downloaded the Stop Motion Studio app, and got right to it. 

CJ can tell you a bit more about the process. 

Earlier today, I made a simple stop motion animation, using about seventy separately-shot frames. The software I used was an app named Stop Motion Studio. Stop Motion Studio enables users to make stop motion videos by taking pictures and putting them in a slideshow.

My animation used a Perler bead design that my sister made of the character Link, the player character in most games in the The Legend of Zelda franchise. In my animation, the Perler bead figure attempts to get on top of a tissue box, to get items stuck inside it. After two unsuccessful attempts, Link brings large coasters, and makes a staircase with them. He ascends the stairs, and triumphantly gets the sword and shield from inside the tissue box. Like I said earlier, animating this took about seventy frames.

Annabelle's video featured one of her ponies. Check it out!


I thought their first forays were pretty darn good. I also thought they left a lot of room for improvement, as directors and cinematographers. For instance, what's in the frame? Check your backgrounds!  Also, HELLO! CJ's arm! That doesn't belong in the movie.

Little do they know, tomorrow's assignment will be re-shooting today's video.

MEANWHILE, AT THE MUSEUM: Oh, the things we often took for granted before the pandemic. One such example? Being able to go to world-class Museum of Flight any old time we wanted

CJ would go there every Thursday night, for his Museum Apprenticeship Program. When he was last there, he installed a really cute display, "The Original Paw Patrol."

I don't think I ever shared a photo of what that looked like. Here it is ...

It's about dogs used in the military, especially circa WWII.

It's hard to see in CJ's photo, but the left side of the display case has info from a WWII dog training manual. 

The right side of the display features a tribute to a veteran who is now a Museum of Flight volunteer,  John E. Roten. The Vietnam-era vet had a dog in combat with him. When he heard what CJ's project was, he came and visited CJ twice during the Museum Apprenticeship Program sessions to check in and offer his assistance. I told CJ he *had* to include Roten in some way in the display. Apparently Roten was on site when CJ installed his display and gave it his seal of approval. Very cool.

It's sad this display is sitting, unseen, in a vacant museum at the moment. :(

In other Museum of Flight news, apparently the astronaut is keeping busy.

Tuesday Doings

SEW WHAT: You've probably seen them ... multiple healthcare providers are turning to social media to post pleas for masks and scrubs. Last week, we signed up to make masks for Providence's 100 Million Masks ask. That became unnecessary "(t)hanks to an overwhelming response from our community, many individuals have volunteered to sew surgical masks for us. However, we’re pleased to report that local manufacturing companies have stepped up to rapidly produce masks and face shields for us on a large scale."

So, yay for that. However. numerous other healthcare providers (not to mention the general public) are still in need of masks, so I decided to dedicate some of my basement time to making some.

As per my usual, I researched the hell out of the process. I read probably three dozen articles, watched numerous videos, read CDC specs, joined two Facebook groups for individuals providing personal protection gear to combat COVID, including "Mask Drive - Help our first responders" and Open Source COVID 19 Medical Devices, got tips from friends and more. I knew I wanted to make masks that had a wire across the nose area, one that had a pocket to insert some sort of filter, which could be anything from a paper towel to part of a vacuum cleaner bag or furnace filter or even a coffee filter. I also wanted one that used ties instead of elastic (the elastic doesn't stand up as well to repeated launderings and the fit can't be adjusted as specifically.

After all the research, I wound up mostly following this video ...

And I used the straps instructions from the "We-Can-Sew-It" Masks tutorial. 

During the first mask, I sewed right along with the video.

The video was easy to follow, including the insertion of the wire for the nose of the bridge.

Cutting and sewing the straps was the most time-consuming part. 

Because I'm self-isolating, I didn't have any humans to try out the mask, so I had to turn to a trusty Klingon. He didn't seem to mind. 

FIASCO CONTINUES: In other COVID-related news, the shortage of tests for the virus continues, all across America. I saw this Tweet, and thought it (unfortunately) sums up the reality of the situation. 

                                 

I can't help but think back to the early days of the U.S. outbreak, when a whole slew of NBA players and team personnel were tested, even though they were asymptomatic. 

I'm not the only one who noticed. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was a bit taken aback  
“We wish them a speedy recovery," he said of those infected, "(b)ut, with all due respect, an entire NBA team should NOT get tested for COVID-19 while there are critically ill patients waiting to be tested,” he tweeted. 

In response to criticism, the Nets team stressed that they used *private* tests for their players, as opposed to "public" ones. In other words, if you're well enough connected and monied,  private testing is available at facilities that have procured testing kits, per USA Today

According to a CNBC article, "Many doctors are left wondering how the NBA is getting access to so many COVID-19 tests when they don’t have access themselves. 'I think the first thing is to figure out how NBA got it. It’s real chaos and there are no firm rules on test access now,' said Dr. David Chao, a former NFL team doctor who is now in private practice." 

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/19/doctors-wonder-if-nba-getting-special-treatment-with-coronavirus-tests.html

NBA Players Association Executive Director Michelle Roberts pointed out that the test inequity isn't an NBA problem, but it's a governmental problem. “The problem that more of us can’t get the tests -- and I’m not apologetic about saying it -- in my view, that rests at the foot of the federal government. They were responsible for making sure we were protected in that regard and I think they failed. Roberts said. “People should not be having to wait in line. The at-risk population should be the first to be tested. But goddamn it, if the government had done what they were supposed to do, we wouldn’t be competing for an opportunity to be tested.”

Amen to that. 

EXPRESSIVE: CJ and Annabelle continue their COVID schedule. They worked on Japanese, played some guitar, and spent some of the day reading.  They got their art on with another "Draw Every Day with JJK." The session focused on body language. 



Here are a couple of drawings from their lesson.

I thought CJ did a great job on the figures below. The top one definitely is posed in a confident way, while the poor guy below looks totally defeated.

The session also included a tutorial about a drawing within a drawing. The first one is drawn on a paper with a couple of folds in it. 

 When you open it up, there's a surprise on the inside!

ANOTHER RESOURCE: I've always been wanting to check out a class or two at Coyote Central (in Seattle's Central District) for a class or two for the kids. Their offerings have always intrigued me, but we just never got around to it.

Well, enter the pandemic. ...

These aren't full blown classes, per se, but Coyote Central does have some project suggestions online during this stay-at-home order. 

Tomorrow, I'm going to challenge the kids to at least start producing a stop-motion animation short. Coyote Central has a few examples on their site.

Pick Me Ups

GAME TIME:  We're working to integrate some pleasant, positive diversions so that we here at MPA, and especially the student body, don't get too down about this whole global pandemic thing.

Yesterday, I said to Christian, "I really think our kids need to play more video games" While that might sound like the complete opposite of what most every parent would normally say, these are not normal times.

I qualified my statement by pointing out that a well-done game can be a wonderful diversion, and noted that not all games are dark and violent. What I was hoping for was for the kids to find a little escape in "shiny, happy games," I explained.

Just a bit before, I'd been talking to Kennedy about a game that was jut released, "Animal Crossing: New Horizons." It's a game that's about building and community. Kennedy described it as 'meditative' in nature. 

Sold! 

I ordered it for the kids last night, and they have just started playing it. Here are CJ's first impressions:  

Seven years after the series' last installment was released, Nintendo's iconic Animal Crossing franchise returned with its latest outing, Animal Crossing: New Horizons. All of the Animal Crossing games are recognized for being low-key, calm games - a stark contrast to the manic pace of most of Nintendo's catalogue. 

While I've only played one Animal Crossing game before (emulating the original GameCube game), I had a basic idea of what Animal Crossing gameplay is like. New Horizons confirmed my perceptions. 

The closest thing there is to an "end goal" in New Horizons is to pay Tom Nook, an anthropomorphic Tanuki, for the deed to the player character's house. To pay for the deed, the player must perform various tasks around the island. New Horizons encourages the player to interact with the other villagers on the island.

I found playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons to be a calming experience, and I look forward to playing it more.

Here's a trailer for the game. 


CLASS IS IN SESSION:  This morning, we finally got around to starting the class via Coursera. 

It's taught by Professor Laurie Santos, a professor in psychology and cognitive science at Yale University. 

As part of the class, Professor Santos recommends downloading an app called ReWi. She says it allows people to track "practices that science has told us can increase happiness in your life, things like savoring more and gratitude and sleeping and exercise." (ReWi can be found in the App Store or in the Google Play Store by searching "ReWi" and looking for ablack and white brain logo. ReWi on iOS & ReWi on Android.)

One of the topics Santos introduced today was the "GI Joe Fallacy," a phrase she and another expert coined. It's based off little vignettes at the end of the GI Joe cartoons of the '80s, where kids were taught some sort of lesson, and the catchphrase "Knowing is half the battle," was used to sum it up.

Santos contends that claim is not true. "Merely knowing isn't enough to put it into practice," she suggests. She used a couple of visual illusions as examples, including the famous Shepard's Table graphic.

Her point was that even when you know the tables are the same length, it still doesn't change how you see it.

Santos pointed to some stats as reasons she decided to teach the class. One was a headline from a 2013 ABC News story "Americans Most Unhappy People in the World." Another was the fact (no source cited) that antidepressants are prescribed at a rate 400 times higher than they were 20 years ago.

The class doesn't have a tremendous amount of work, but there are some "rewirements" (a clever play on words, I thought). Santos says, "Research suggests that if you do these rewirements as prescribed, you should get a boost in your mood and overall well-being."

Time will tell. 

A couple of things we did today involved taking some assessments as baselines. One was PERMA, an acronym for Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment. There are 23 questions. After completing them, you get scores ranging from 0-10 for each (PERMA) pillar, along with scores for overall well-being, health, and negative emotions.

Another assessment we took was The Authentic Happiness Inventory. It was 24 questions, designed to measure overall happiness levels. At the end of the survey you receive a score between 1 and 5 based on your responses. 

The third assessment was a measure of Character Strengths. That was 120 questions (but it's still relatively quick). After taking the test, you receive a ranking of your 24 strengths. (My top three were honesty, humor and perspective. I haven't asked the kids what theirs were.)

SCRUBBED: There's been tons of talk about washing hands in recent weeks, and plenty of demonstrative videos. This one is my favorite, so far.