SOMBER ANNIVERSARY: The airwaves were full of recollections about President John Fitzgerald Kennedy's assassination 50 years ago today.
I went through a phase decades ago where I read everything I could get my hands on about the assassination. I read one article this week, an interview with one of the ER doctors who treated Kennedy, that brought up an angle I hadn't heard before. It was widely known that JFK had a terrible back, to the point of being debilitating. He often wore a brace - super old school by today's standard - rigid and high waisted.
It made as much sense as anything I've seen or read about the shooting, and explains the video I've seen over and over and over of Kennedy's odd, upright position after the first bullet.
I hate thinking about it, and I hate writing about it even more. Watching footage of the aftermath and his memorial is overwhelming. And it all went down before I was even born.
I named a son after JFK. Countless sons and daughters out there are, likewise, named.
Afterward, they each continued to explore the site, watching educational videos and playing games.
DEXTEROUS DINOS: Last night, the Dinos got ahold of a deck of cards and started building.
Annabelle was pretty amazed as she approached, 'fresh' from slumber.
After a bit, the kids took the dinos' work down, and I challenged them to build their own house o' cards.
While doing so, they each gained a new appreciation for what the dinos had gone through the night before.
CJ took to it a little more quickly than Annabelle.
After many failed attempts, she was happy to get four cards up in ANY configuration and called it good.
The night before, the dinos set an example of good oral hygiene.
PONY PRELUDE: Tomorrow is The Day. My Little Pony's Season Four premiere. The adventures in Canterlot continue!
The first episode is on at 7 a.m., and the kids are all on fire about that.
CJ is also on fire about the marathon that precedes it, starting at 3 a.m. our time. So, we've busted out the sleeping bags and I'm gonna drag them out of bed at 3 a.m so they can at least pretend they watched it all.
PONYFECTION: Recently, I caught Annabelle studying a couple of drawings of hers side-by-side. She was marveling at how she's progressed in the art of drawing ponies. You can definitely tell the before and after in the picture above.
Speaking of ponies, the new season of "My Little Pony Friendship is Magic" premieres this Saturday (Nov. 23) at 7 a.m. our time. We'll be watching, of course.
Prior to the season premiere, there's a MLP marathon. It starts at 3 a.m. I don't think we'll be up for that. ;) PRETTY IN PINK: Annabelle made a cartoon a couple days ago. ...
The text is small in this format. The first panel says MOST MAJOR TOY COMPANIES on top. The characters are saying: "We need another product, STAT!" and the other thinks, "Hmmmm."
The second character then says, "I got it!" ... We take the regular, color it pink, and say it's for girls!"
SAVE THE DATE: Exciting news in the inbox today. An email from Scholastic let us know they have an event planned featuring authors Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid) and Dav Pilkey (Captain Underpants), two of CJ and Annabelle's favorites on one stage. On Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2014 at 10 a.m. PST, the authors will share a "Story Smashup." Students are invited to write an ending for the story. You can learn more and sign up on line here: http://www.scholastic.com/kpwebcast/?eml=TRADE/e/20131121///PilkeyKinneyWebcast//////&ym_MID=1508572&ym_rid=5795565
ABBREVIATED: This post is going to be short, because it's actually causing me significant pain to write it. Something wretched has happened to my right eye. It's the color of Mars and burns like Mercury. Painful, and looking at light/a computer screen makes it worse. It started on Tuesday. I suppose if it's not markedly better tomorrow, I'm going to have to go to the doctor. Boo.
Last night, Dinovember continued with the Dinos having a bit of target practice. It is unknown why they were shooting darts at this apparently happy-go-lucky cousin. The large purple subject was seemingly an object of derision.
BIRTHDAYS ABOUND: Today, much of our energy was devoted to prepping for Christian's birthday. He's in good company, birthday wise. It's also Vice President Joe Biden's birthday. And Nov. 20 is also Edwin Hubble and Bobby Kennedy's birthday. Oh, and let's not forget Rodger Bumpass, the voice of Squidward on SpongeBob Squarepants.
Also sharing this special birthday is the International Space Station!
On this day in 1998, a Russian rocket lifted the first piece of what is now the largest man-made structure ever built in space.
Zarya ("Sunrise" in Russian) was the name of that first module of the space station representing 15 nations. Zarya is also known as Functional Cargo Block (FGB). It's mostly used for storage now.
Just two weeks after Zayra was launched, NASA's shuttle Endeavour launched, with Unity (a/k/a Node 1) on board. The two modules were linked together.
The space station has continued to grow over the past 15 years. Today, it's about the size of a football field and ranks second only to the moon among bright objects in the night sky.
REFINED DINOS: Dinovember continues, and lookie what our dino-mic duo was up to this morning when the kids awoke. The posh pair was having a spot of tea and some biscuits (which the kids instantly recognized as the same ones they had on the Amsterdam to Seattle flight via Delta).
SCORED: Math question on the anniversary of the Gettysburg address: How many score and years ago was the Gettysburg address delivered? I told the kids it was a race and they were to write the answer down and submit it to me.
Hint: Today marked the 150th anniversary.
In short order, CJ submitted: "Seven score and a decade ago."
Annabelle wrote "Four score and 70 years ago = 150 years."
Both are right, of course.
After the brief math challenge, we watched a CBS News video: Battle of Gettysburg Day 3: A "do-or-die moment," featuring Civil War historian Allen Guelzo
SLIDESHOW: The kids each have a sound-related presentation to make in their Shoreline science class tomorrow, and today, for the first time they each put together a PowerPoint (type) presentation. (They actually used the Open Office equivalent. CJ's is about canine communication, while Annabelle addresses the burning, "What does the fox say?" question.
Speaking of PowerPoints, today is the anniversary of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Thank god there wasn't PowerPoint back then. ... http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld006.htm
ONE FOR THE BOOKS: Another day, another rocket launch. This time it was a relatively small one, from Wallops Island, Virginia. Though it wasn't the biggest rocket, it was packedwith a record-breaking payload of 29 satellites for the U.S. military, NASA and ten high school student teams' Cubesat projects. The Minotaur 1 rocket lifted off at 5:15 our time.
Twenty nine more things orbiting up there. We here at MPA have been talking lately about all the things up there, as, I'm sure, anyone who has seen "Gravity" has done. We are definitely going to go see "Space Junk 3D" at The Museum of Flight in the near future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hl28A9NfU4#action=share
But back to yesterday's MAVEN launch for a minute. LOVE this NASA photo (by NASA's Bill Ingalls), due to its juxtaposition of the winged creatures taking flight along with the rocket. Sweet!
Photo: NASA ON OUR WAY!: With great anticipation, we watched the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from the Cape Canaveral
at 10:28 this morning, our time.
Months ago, we'd submitted our names via a NASA portal to be put aboard MAVEN. Here's the spacecraft in the clean room (photo courtesy of NASA/Kennedy Space Center).
In its upper righthand corner, affixed to it is a special DVD bearing the thousands upon thousands of names of folks like us who wanted to hop on board. :) The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics was kind enough to email us the photo above, as well as the closeup below, showing our "seat" on board.
We watched live coverage of the launch via NASA TV http://www.nasa.gov/ntv.
BUSY DINOS: Dinovember has taken our house by storm. They started last Thursday night, and Friday, Saturday and Sunday the dinos amused the kids greatly.
Saturday morning, they woke up to finding dinos roasting on the open fire. Er, I mean, dinos roasting marshmallows over the closest thing to fire they could find - our electric insert into a '60s vintage freestanding fireplace.
Saturday night, the dinos were super busy, because come Sunday morning, the kids woke up to this ...
The dinos had tried to build a time machine to get back to their era.
When he discovered it, CJ started wantonly turning knobs on the time machine. Horrified, I told him he's lucky we all didn't wind up back in the Jurassic period. You do NOT EVER wantonly turn knobs on a TIME MACHINE, I scolded him. Geez.
Annabelle noticed that one of the wires the dinos used to connect one knob to a receiver on the front was a wire coated in plastic. Noting that there's no way that would conduct electricity, she suspects that was their downfall.
Monday morning, the big dinos revealed they have a bit of bully in them.
They had lured some of the smaller guys into a trap, using the classic Mousetrap game.
Annabelle was delighted that when she sprang the trap, the cheese eating dinos were trapped.
They did not suffer, though. In fact, after they were freed, they enjoyed engaging in a conga line.
GUITAR GIRL: "I think this might be a callous, Mom!" Annabelle announced excitedly in the middle of "Feliz Navidad" this afternoon. Yay for callouses! That means she's been practicing more.
Speaking of needing to practice more, today I tried an experiment with my newish phone - recording a quick video clip. It's Bee, covering Macklemore.
ALIVE!!!: Last night before retiring, the kids left their newly acquired dinos on the kitchen island, convinced they wouldn't move overnight, despite what they'd heard about Dinovember, the month toy dinosaurs come to live in the wee small hours of the morning.
Upon upping, the first thing they each did was make a beeline for the island, to check on the dinos, which had disappeared.
CJ did a cursory look around and found nothing. A bit later, when Annabelle got up, she went to the pantry for something and found the scene above.
The kids were quite tickled, and our first day of Dinovember was a success.
TURKEY TIME: It's been too long since we've done a formal art session, and waaay too long since we've enjoyed a Bruce Blitz cartooning tutorial.
We used to follow Blitz's tutelage fairly often, when it was "On Demand" on our cable provider, Comcast. However, it disappeared months back. At the time I discovered its disappearance, I searched for it online, but to no avail. I decided to give it another go today, and had better results, happily.
And good news for non-Comcast people. At no point did it ask me to sign in, so it looks like it's available to everyone - at least as of this writing. (I should warn people, though, that it took two browsers and two computers to get it going. It didn't like my Chrome [saying something about an 'Incognito window, which was a setting I didn't have on] and it didn't like my IE, saying my Flash was out of date [it isn't]. Mercifully, it worked on CJ's laptop on the first try.)
The kids had no trouble following the steps, and used acrylic chalks to color their drawings after the video was over. Annabelle gave CJ some pointers in the fine art of blending.
Here's his finished product. Pretty cute!
And here's Annabelle's turkey. I like its eyelashes. :)
MORNING WALK: It wasn't particularly nice this a.m. - oppressive gray. But we needed to get some motion in to our morning, and the doggies were overdue for a walk.
We headed for one of our favorite destinations, Fishermen's Terminal. It's always interesting to check out the working boats there.
SHUNTING: We had more fun today working out a bear of a challenge in "The Amazing Mathematical Amusement Arcade." It involved a train engine, a having to swap the places of two cars on a round about, with a stipulation being the engine could fit under a foot bridge over the round about, but the cars couldn't.
You know me, Ms. Hands on Learner, I immediately set about finding props to use. We settled on Disney Pixar "Cars" characters for our train cars, Annabelle drew the track on the white board, and I made us a pseudo-footbridge (which all of our cars fit under, but it served as a reminder during our attempts at solving it).
It was a toughie, and we helped ourselves by repeating the phrase "no one ever said you can't ..." while trying new solutions. That's akin to Gpa's comment on last night's post noting, "When a problem stumps you, step back and try to uncover your Unconscious Assumptions."
Eventually, they figured it out. One turning point was realizing that you could haul two cars at a time.
MOM'S OK: Some of you may recall I posted last week about India launching its first ever interplanetary mission, a spacecraft headed for an eventual Martian orbit. MOM has instruments on board to return color images of Mars' surface, study the Red Planet's composition and survey its atmosphere for methane.
What I've neglected to post, however, is that said spacecraft had a worrisome hiccough a few days back.
MOM was designed to orbit Earth for a spell, picking up speed before its flight to Mars. Once in Earth orbit, there were to be a series of rocket firings to boost it in orbit. The first three went as planned, but last Sunday, on what was the fourth firing, there was an abort when a rocket firing failed.
A number of the space-y pages I frequent were pretty much predicting the mission a failure at that point.
However, according to a report today, corrective measures were a success and MOM is back on track. Let's hope that's the case and that MOM's on her way to Mars in short order.
HAPPY MATH: As I've documented here, over the summer I took an online course through Stanford featuring professor Jo Boaler and her awesome approach to math education.
As wonderful as it was, the course paralyzed me, in a way. I delayed busting out the predictable, very standard approach Singapore Math book this fall. Don't get me wrong, it's a VERY good standard approach math book. But it is what it is. When we did get it out, the kids and I rather miserably and mindlessly slogged through the first few pages before I declared, "No mas!"
Instead, I resourced Jo Boaler's list, and found a book called "The Amazing Mathematical Amusement Arcade." We ordered it and today we started in on the first page. Such fun!
The first problem involved a graphic with nine sticks used to make four equilateral triangles. You were supposed to take three away, and with the remaining sticks make four equilateral triangles. How is this possible?!?!
At first, the kids labored to make a modified version of the example in the book, on the flat. There were starts and stops and before long, we were asking ourselves, "What would Captain Kirk do?"
After about 10 minutes of frustration, I told them I'd give them a clue. "Think outside the ..."
"Box!" Annabelle finished my sentence.
"No," I corrected. "Think outside the CUBE."
I could see lightbulbs go off. Suddenly, the challenge became 3-D. But that didn't mean they were right right off the bat. ...
As you can see, Annabelle used too many sticks and definitely does NOT have four equilateral triangles.
But before long, they each solved the puzzle.
After that, it was on to a classic quandary - one I remember solving when I was about their age. A man had to get across the river with his goat, a head of cabbage, and a wolf. He had a boat, but couldn't leave the goat with the cabbage or the wolf with the goat. How did he manage it?
The kids talked about it for a couple of minutes with no solution. I told them I'm a visual learner, and prefer to look at a problem. So, we got out a boat (book mark), a man (a spool of thread), a wolf (a packet of Taco Bell hot sauce), a goat (an eraser) and a head of cabbage (some Play-Doh). Our scenario is pictured atop the blog.
The kids worked through a few scenarios before hitting upon a solution. I think our primitive mock up helped. :)
Afterward, we talked about how these challenges involved sequencing, logic, non-linear thinking and other elements of great value when working math problems. "They're about math SENSE," I told the kids, thinking Professor Jo Boaler would have been proud of me, LOL.
They both practically begged to do more problems from the book. That's a good sign. :)
THE ONE AND ONLY: Last weekend, the kids and I cleaned out our big raised bed at the top of the lot. In the process we harvest the one and only pumpkin our garden produced.
Take a look. It's the orange thing, about the size of a navel orange. It kinda looks like a Walla Walla onion in this photo.
Problem is, the seed packet from whence the pumpkin sprang said something about it being The Biggest Pumpkin in the History of Big Pumpkins, or some such thing.
Grossly false advertising. MAVEN MINUTE: Today, we watched a new PSA hosted by Reading Rainbow/Star Trek TNG star LeVar Burton all about NASA's MAVEN spacecraft, set to launch next week.
Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission is set to reach the Red Planet in Sept. of 2014, with a mission of helping solve "the mystery of the missing atmosphere," reports Burton. Check out the quick overview of the mission here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijAO0FFExx0
Annabelle reminded me today that our names will be on board that spacecraft, as we participated in NASA's "Going to Mars" program. We even wrote haikus for the occasion. Today, we checked out the 'winning' haikus. I was glad to see my favorite one at the top:
It’s funny, they named
Mars after the God of War
Have a look at Earth
Benedict Smith
United Kingdom
GOLDMINE: CJ was a non stop source of bemusement today. First up was around 10 this morning. I noticed he was chewing and asked the obvious question: "What are you chewing?"
"Gum," he deadpanned. Anticipating my next question, "Where did you get it?" since I hadn't given him any, CJ went ahead and confessed, "To be honest, it's from yesterday. It was in my pocket."
All together now: :"Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwww"
A bit later I was moaning about my current illness, which CJ is also coming down with. CJ quickly dubbed it "The Rick Virus" and called his oldest brother "Patient Zero," LOL.
This afternoon, we had a car load of things to donate and were headed across the Ballard Bridge to Goodwill. We were also going to stop at Fred Meyer, and I recalled, aloud, that there's a Salvation Army donation truck in their parking lot, and suggested we could kill two birds with one stone.
"Ah, ah, ah," CJ immediately piped up from the backseat. "They are NOT LGBT friendly, and we do not support them."
And so, my backseat conscience shamed me into going that extra mile, literally, to Goodwill.
After Goodwill, back to Fred Meyer we went. I told the kids our first stop was the toy aisle, in search of dinosaurs. I explained to them I had recently read several posting on the Internet about this phenomenon called Dinovember, where toy dinosaurs come to life overnight during November.
Apparently a skeptic, CJ replied, "I think it's more likely that I would get struck by lightning and win the lottery at the exact same nanosecond while reciting the Quran in classical Arabic and reading the complete biography of Kim Il-sung than it is that inanimate objects suddenly popping to life."
Hmph. Just wait until tomorrow, CJ, ye of little faith.
