Orion and Pluto

SCENTSATIONAL: Every time we drive through Sodo (the stadium district, south of downtown), we roll down our windows on Fourth Ave S. at Lander in hopes of catching a whiff from the Franz factory. 

This morning, on our way back from Kent (yes, there again!), we drove by Franz and the kids knew the drill. 

"Can you smell it?! Can you smell it?"! Annabelle urgently asked CJ as they powered their windows down.

Fortunately, the ovens were on, and we got a great big whiff. Mmmm ...

As we sat at a red light next to it today, we noticed a sign in the building's window that said he production of bread at the Sodo factory in one week would span 17 miles if the loaves were placed end-to-end. That's a lot of bread.

I've heard that Franz gives bakery tours. I'd definitely like to check that out some time. 

PLOP PLOP!: Today, water impact testing continued on the Orion capsule. An 18,000-pound (8,165 kilogram) test version of the spacecraft was dropped in a pool at NASA's Langley Research Center this morning.

                                                                           Image Credit: NASA 

Last summer, we watched Orion's swing drop testing at the Hydro Impact Basin. During those tests, the capsule slid down into the water in a lateral  motion.  In these latest tests, Orion is being dropped vertically into the pool for the first time.

The capsule needs to pass the tests as Orion and the (heavy launch) Space Launch System are NASA ticket back to manned spaceflight. Hopefully in the not-too-distant future, SLS and Orion will expand human presence beyond low Earth orbit and enable exploration across the solar system.

Here's a short video of today's test. 


In other space-y news, for the last couple of nights we've enjoyed watching nice long bright fly-overs of the ISS. 

BALANCING ACT: We took another field trip to Kent this a.m., tagging along with Rick on yet another job interview. While he got grilled, we shopped at a WinCo!!! We used to shop at a WinCo all the time in Vancouver, and I miss WinCo desperately. (Well, really, mostly I miss WinCo's prices.) So my heart sang when we spied the Winco sign near our destination. We shopped for 45 minutes and $125 worth. Then, to kill the time while waiting for Rick, we amused ourselves in the parking lot, having balancing competitions, finding pennies and so on. Good times.

SAD ANNIVERSARY: Today is the fifth anniversary of Pluto's "Dwarf Planet" reclassification.  As Neil deGrasse Tyson Tweeted today, "May the little fella RIP (Revolve in Peace)." 

My reaction surrounding this reclassification tragedy was captured nicely on this TeeFury design: 

STUFFED: Once again this year I headed up the ticket orders and distribution for the Puyallup Fair's educational ticket program for the Seattle Homeschool Group. Mercifully, the (free!) Puyallup Fair tickets arrived today, so this evening we stuffed order envelopes as we bounced back and forth between watching the Mariners (lose) and the Seahawks (win).

It's very generous of the fair to donate these tickets, and we send them a thank you note every year. 

I sure am glad to have this commitment/project over with. Now I can concentrate on my parents' 50th anniversary party.

Morning Report

MONOPOLY: Apologies for not getting around to publishing last night. I hope you were able to sleep without an update as to our daily grind, ha ha.

Truth of the matter is, all our our MPA computers were monopolized. We're down a computer now, and CJ and Annabelle were in the middle of something Very Important on two of the PCs, while Rick was using a third to prep for a couple more interviews tomorrow. And frankly, after they all finally abandoned post, I was too wiped out to post.

Until next time ...

Garden Harvest

BOUNTIFUL: We continue to pluck things off plants 'round her. Today's harvest = a couple of squash (I forget what kind, but Christian says they're cucurbita pepo, or 'grey zucchini.' Now I have to figure out what to do with them. They don't look grey to me. And I think this is going to be the extent of our broccoli, so we better savor it. 

Meanwhile, the corn and tomatoes continue to grow. Here's hoping there's enough summer left for them to be seen through to fruition. 

ON THE MOVE: Big news from the Red Planet. The Mars Science Laboratory is on the move! For the first time since touching down Aug. 5, Curiosity has put its wheels in motion and did some motoring around. 

It was announced today that NASA approved the Curiosity science team's choice to name MSL's touch down site Bradbury Landing, in honor of the  the late author Ray Bradbury. He would have been 92 years old today.

Making its first movement on the Martian surface, Curiosity's drive combined forward, turn and reverse segments. After the test drive, it was roughly 20 feet (6 meters) from the spot where it landed 16 days ago. Here is a post-run photo, taken by a front Hazard-Avoidance camera, which has a fisheye lens. 

Image:  NASA/JPL-Caltech 

THE GREAT OUTDOORS: Yesterday, we accompanied Rick on his rounds to a couple schools to the south where he had job interviews. While he got grilled, we played in neighboring parks. 

Look at how much fun we had! Here, Annabelle lies in the grass moaning, after falling off a(na actually really neat-o) spinning piece of equipment and bruising her tailbone.

And here, CJ looks like he's miserable and in the pokey. He's actually on a play structure, promise.

Though the pictures don't prove it, we did have lots of fun and got some good exercise.

Fit for a King

SUPREME COURT: Tonight's post is just a placeholder. I'm too tired to recount all of today, but from 5 to 10 p.m. we were at Safeco Field for a special celebration. It was the first start ace pitcher Felix Hernandez has made since he pitched his perfect game last Wednesday.

The Mariners decided to throw Felix a party, so we had to be there. The first 34,000 fans to the game would get free commemorative t-shirts and K (for strikeouts) poster cards, so we wanted to be there when the gates opened. We weren't the only ones with that idea. The lines stretched 'round the block even before we parked the car.

Fortunately the lines moved quickly, all six of us got our shirt and K cards and as a bonus it was Mariners trading card day, so we got those, as well. Sweet!

We sat in our usual spot - the top row above the third base line.

Usually when Felix pitches at home, there's just one section of Safeco designated as the "King's Court," where fans get the t-shirts and posters. But tonight, the entire stadium was Felix's kingdom. It was odd to see Safeco Field awash in yellow. Usually it's mostly various shades of Mariners' blue and gray.

The atmosphere was electric for nine innings and ffortunately, the party ended the right way. Felix pitched a gem and the Mariners won. We got to seem some great defense, and some tape measure home runs, to boot. Good times!

Mars, Mud and More

 

THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE BALLARD:  Caught this pic of Bee's feet tonight outside Hale's Ales, where someone has stamped a long yellow brick 'road' alongside the south end of their building. Annabelle started skipping down it immediately. :)

BON VOYAGER: Today marks an amazing aerospace milestone - the 35th anniversary of the launch of the Voyager 2 space probe. It's interesting looking at this launch photo.

PHOTO: NASA/JPL

Perched atop a Titan/Centaur rocket it looks so retro, and at 35-years old I suppose it is. But what's gobsmacking about it is the damn thing's still going.

Over the past 35 years, Voyager 2 has passed Mars, Venus, the asteroid belt, Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and beyond. Right now, Voyager 2 is about 9 billion miles (15 billion kilometers) away from the sun, heading in a southerly direction. And even as we 'speak' it's exploring interstellar space and making toward the next solar system! Unfreakingbelievable!

It's the longest-operating NASA spacecraft ever. NASA/JPL managers estimate Voyagers 1 and 2 spacecraft will have enough electrical power to continue collecting data and communicating it back to Earth through 2020, and possibly through 2025.

MUDDY: This weekend was another Mostly Very Not Fun one spent working around the house. Specifically, installing drywall/plasterboard in the addition. Boo hiss boo! Of course, Annabelle thought it was fun, begging to screw on drywall and mud and tape. CJ kept his distance. Smart boy. ;)

CAPITALISM 101: It's interesting - CJ doesn't spend as much time playing online games as he does studying them. For instance. while Annabelle would play Roblox 24/7 if we let her (exploring all the servers, chatting up a storm and such), CJ is busy memorizing the history of the Web site, reciting bios of its founders and so on. On the site, players can outfit their virtual bodies with gear and I think CJ has the whole catalog memorized. Many items are limited in the number sold, and once they're out, their value often climbs. This weekend CJ started doing some speculative buying. When an item went on sale that he thought would be popular, he'd buy it and then turn around and sell it - for a profit - a bit later. Since his first three stabs at venture capitalism made him some "Robux" he's a bit giddy with the for-profit possibilities. I think this counts as math education, right?

MEANWHILE, ON MARS: Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity continues to phone home and its news is remarkable. The compact car sized rover is working wonderfully!

Have I mentioned MSL has a frickin' laser?!?? This weekend the red rover vaporized some Martian rock. Oh yeah!!!


Its target was a fist-size rock called "Coronation." The laser is built into the MSL's Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument. It his poor, defenseless Coronation with 30 pulses of its laser during a 10-second period. Each pulse delivers more than a million watts of power for about five one-billionths of a second. Take that, Mars!

Per a NASA press release, "The energy from the laser excites atoms in the rock into an ionized, glowing plasma. ChemCam catches the light from that spark with a telescope and analyzes it with three spectrometers for information about what elements are in the target."

By all reports, ChemCam is performing beautifully. "It's surprising that the data are even better than we ever had during tests on Earth, in signal-to-noise ratio," said ChemCam Deputy Project Scientist Sylvestre Maurice of the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planetologie (IRAP) in Toulouse, France. "It's so rich, we can expect great science from investigating what might be thousands of targets with ChemCam in the next two years."

Exciting stuff! 

Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows

TRANSFORMED: Yesterday's big news was CJ's acquisition of a white fedora.

It fit him so well in more ways that one, and if we had my druthers, we would have left it as is. But CJ had other plans. Big rainbow colored plans, in fact.

If you read yesterday's post, you know CJ is Super Obsessed with a Rainbow Fedora in the game Roblox. And he wanted one of his own, in the real world. So this morning, we were at the craft store by 9 a.m., laying in proper supplies, including glitter. ...

We had to do a little color mixing once we got home.

 And some very careful painting. ...

After all the colors dried, the hat got a light shower of silver glitter all over. And in the end, CJ had a custom hat he was VERY happy with. 

In fact, he was so happy with it, he wore it to the grocery store - along with his My Little Pony shirt with Rainbow Dash on it. 

I'll just come out and say it. He pretty much looked like he was ready to grand marshal a gay pride parade. And that didn't bother me, and he was downright proud of how he looked, so who cares what other people think. I caught a few people gawking. I'm sure it was just because they're jealous THEY don't have a sparkling rainbow fedora.

HISTORY BUFFS: We're working on a little artsy-craftsy project that has to do with things that happened 50 years ago. There are no shortage of things to research and write about.

Today, we learned that it was Feb. 20, 1962 when astronaut John H. Glenn, Jr. became the first American to orbit the earth. Glenn named his spacecraft Friendship 7, but the mission was known officially as Mercury-Atlas 6, because it was the sixth Mercury launch to use a modified Atlas-D rocket. 

Glenn orbited Earth three times, with each orbit lasting 88 minutes and 29 seconds. The entire mission lasted 4 hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds before he splashed down in his capsule. In all, Glenn traveled a total of 75,679 miles. 

In '62, the space race was in full swing. While both the Soviets and Americans put men in orbit, but NASA was eyeing a much further target – an interplanetary encounter. Enter the Mariner space probe program. ...

On July 22, 1962, Mariner 1 was launched, its destination Venus. However, the rocket veered erratically off course almost immediately and was destroyed by the Range Safety Officer.

Bugs were worked out and the nearly identical Mariner 2 was launched on Aug. 27. The operation went flawlessly, and less than four months later (Dec. 12), Mariner 2 passed within 22,000 miles of Venus.

Launch of Mariner 2, 1962 - photo courtesy NASA

Mariner 2 recorded the temperature at Venus for the first time, discovering a hot atmosphere of 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Also, Mariner 2’s solar wind experiment measured for the first time the density, velocity, composition and variation over time of the solar wind.

Fifty years later, Mariner 2 is still out there, making lonely orbits around the sun.

Artist Illustration courtesy NASA

MOVIE REVIEW: The kids hit a movie with their brother Kennedy today. Together, the three took in ParaNorman. CJ started making noises about seeing it a couple of weeks ago, when promo ads began in heavy rotation on TV. I don't know much about it, other than it's animated and at least somewhat comedic.

When they got home, I asked the kids to write a review of it for me. 

Annabelle's take: Today I saw the movie ParaNorman and it was a very good movie. It was about a kid who had the ability to talk to the dead, and his name was Norman.

Norman was very unusual, and people don't believe he could really talk to ghosts.
But he could. Nobody knew that Norman could see the dead, or even talk to them.

I'm not trying to spoil anything, but there is a happy ending, you might giggle or cry a little, like I did. The movie was overall good and it had a balanced amount of comedy and horror. I went to my 3rd favorite theater, and so it was great for me.

CJ's take: Paranorman was a movie about a kid named Norman and his ability to speak to ghosts. In the beginning of the movie, Norman is watching a horror movie with his dead grandma. Norman is late for school. In school, Norman walks up to his locker with the word "freak" and his friend, Neil has the word "fatty" written on it by the school's bully, Alvin. later in school, Norman does a play with Neil about how in 1712 a witch was taken to court, and when she was found guilty, she was going to get hung, but she made the 7 accusers die a horrible and gruesome death. The school did the play to celebrate the 300th anniversary of it happening.

Clothes Horses

FASHION PLATE: This morning we went to the mall. Yes, you read it right. THE MALL. 

My least favorite place on the planet (and yes, that covers *any* mall). We went because Rick needed a shirt for an interview and CJ and Annabelle just *love* going to the mall.

We were sooooooo lucky. We parked by JCPenney and we practically walked right in to The Perfect Shirt. Hooray! Mission accomplished. I was ready to leave!! But I didn't want to deprive CeeJ and Bee of the Full Mall Experience, so that meant we had to check out the food court. On our way there, we walked by a display of summer hats, and there I spied a white fedora.

"Is this something you'd be interested in?" I asked CJ, knowing the answer in advance. 

He answered in the affirmative. 

Why his fascination with fedoras? It's rooted in Roblox - he and Annabelle's favorite online game/social networking site of the moment/month.  (In case you're wondering, 'What's Roblox?' according to their "About Us" page, it's "a leading user-generated gaming site that makes players the architects of their own 3D worlds, drawing over one billion page views and 21 million in-game hours each month. The site is ranked #1 in the US for total engagement time within the 8-14 year old segment.")

Christian and I find it fascinating that on Roblox, CJ is a complete fashionista. He changes his outfits, accessories, his hair, his smile and so on several times a day, often consulting one of us for our opinions on his options, whereas in real life he'll wear the same t-shirt 5 days in a row if we let him. 

On Roblox, there is a voluminous catalog of clothing and accessories players can buy, and for weeks now, CJ has had his eye on the coveted rainbow fedora 

Usually he uses his Robux (the money system on the site) to buy his wardrobe items, but some items are priced ridiculously high. For instance, the rainbow fedora is $11,500 Robux. That translates to about $100 Real World dollars. Which is, IMHO, ridiculous and I'm certainly not funding that. 

I will, however, fund a sharp looking real life fedora (just $15).  

CJ was thrilled with his fedora and wore it all day, even in the 95 degree heat. And now he has Big Plans for it. Tonight we bought fabric paint to transform it into a real life rainbow fedora. Stay tuned.

INTO THE WOODS: This afternoon, Rick had a job interview down in Kent, and the kids and I tagged along - no, not to the interview, but just to the general vicinity, as I looked it up on Mapquest and saw there was a good sized park next door. 

And so, CJ, Annabelle and I spent an hour plus in shady Scenic Hill Park. The kids played on a play structure with a little girl, whose mother was fresh from teaching fourth grade in Sweden. We had an interesting conversation about Sweden's school system. 

After the play ground, we struck out into the woods, at the "Pine Loop" trailhead. 

We were hiking blind, as there was no map of the trail. We had no idea how long it was, how many legs there were, or anything.

We took note of what was growing (lots of fern, cedar, pine trees, some blackberries, a crab apple tree or two, and more), as well as tons of creepy crawly things. (I've never seen so many ants in my life. They were literally crawling all over the trail by the thousands.) We noted holes in the ground that might be homes for field mice or maybe even snakes.

The kids were a bit concerned at not having a trail guide of any kind, and I couldn't blame them. I did tell them that we had a couple things going for us, though. One was we knew the area was bordered on the south by a school, and to the north was a community swimming pool. I told them as long as we could hear the shrieks of the swimmers, we could always find our way to civilization. 

After just a couple minutes of walking, and taking a path to the south, we happened upon an outdoor classroom. I bet teachers from Scenic Hill Elementary get good use out of the spot!

From there, we continued heading west, away from the parking lot where we started. We walked and walked and walked. And, the voices from the pool became fainter, and we encountered many a spider web across the trail. I asked the kids how the spider webs could help us navigate. They weren't sure. I told them that if we were breaking spider webs it meant a) we were the first people through the trail in awhile, and b) that also meant that clearly WE hadn't been on that path before. 

With no pool voices, the kids grew more nervous. I told them to do a 360-scan and see if they could see anywhere where it appeared the trees cleared. That could mean there's civilization/a building there. They spied a spot to the southwest, so we headed that way. 

However, civilization it wasn't. Instead, the clearing was a cliff. The world dropped away, revealing a pretty partial view of  a valley and some mountains in the distance. The kids weren't too into the view, tho. They'd hoped we'd find a parking lot, I think. :)

Undeterred, I asked them to continue along the cliff's edge for a bit, so we could take in the sights. We walked another couple of minutes and came to a clearing with a fabulous surprise. A tire swing in the middle of the forest! Woohoo!

By the looks of it, it was quite obviously not official Parks Department equipment, but we took our chances. ;)

The kids said they felt like they were swinging out over the edge of the cliff while on it. Cool!

After the swing, we started making our way back to the parking lot. We took a couple of wrong turns (the spider webs let us know!), but soon we heard the pool partiers' voices and before too long found our parking lot - at the exact same moment Rick was emerging. How's that for timing?!