IN REVERSE: A shadow-selfie, here's a photo taken by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity. The pic was taken with the left-eye camera of MSL's stereo Navigation Camera (NavCam).
Recently, project managers decided to have the one-ton rover drive in reverse, in hopes of reducing excessive wear on its six metal wheels. which have been taking a beating over the last few months. Curiosity completed its first long backward drive on Feb. 18.
Curiosity is slowly making its way to the base of 3.4 mile high Mount Sharp. It should reach there by June. Right now, it's in the Moonlight Valley region of the Red Planet.
MUSIC MAKERS: We listened to a couple of lectures today for our Beatles' music class. The kids are really enjoying it. It's easy for them to understand, they're rather familiar with The Beatles catalog, so they know most of the music being referenced, and the subject matter is a lot easier than physics. :)
As usual, Annabelle has been employing her cartoon-note-taking approach.
EARLY RISERS: While most people sleep in on Saturdays, that's the day of the week CJ and Annabelle get up earliest. Their favorite show, "My Little Pony Friendship is Magic" is on at 7 a.m., so they're up around 6:45.
Annabelle churns out several ponies a week - and sometimes several a day - in crayon, chalk, and on computer. Here's one she made in MS Paint recently. Its name is Partly Cloudy.
ROCKET FIRE: Today marks the anniversary of John Glenn's 1962 flight aboard the Mercury "Friendship 7"
spacecraft. It was the United States' first manned
orbital mission. After launching form Kennedy Space
Center, Glenn completed a successful three-orbit mission around the
earth, reaching a maximum altitude of approximately 162 statute
miles, an a velocity of 17,500 miles per hour (the same speed the International Space Station maintains to stay in orbit at the present). Glenn's flight was a total of 4 hours, 55 minutes, and 23 seconds.
GRAPHIC: NASA History
Fast forward 52 years, this evening we sat and watched (online) the launch of a Delta IV rocket from KSC. On board was a satellite for the Air Force.
We happened to be at one of our favorite hang outs when the launch went down, Chuck's on 85th. I will admit, we're guilty of making a little ruckus when it lifted off. "Sorry. Rocket launch," I explained to the people in our vicinity.
EIGHTIES BABY: CJ has recently become semi-obsessed with the movie "Tron." He became aware of it via some online games he plays. We tracked down a copy of "Tron" through Seattle Public Library and today, we picked it up. He quickly set about watching it. I remembered the movie as being plodding and not engaging. Well, that's not how he saw it. CJ was captivated from first frame to last despite the dated technology. Ironically, he kept raving about how good the animation was given its age. Go figure.
ARTSY: While at the library, as luck would have it, while the kids were in the library picking up Tron (as the pups and I waited outside), it turned out 'Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii" was also ready for pickup. We watched that this evening. Trippy. Very analog.
Filmed in 1972, although it's filmed in an ancient Roman amphitheater, there is no audience, which only serves to make it more ethereal. The amphitheater was closed for six days for the filming.
I LOVE this Roger Waters' quote (via Wikipedia from another source) about the experience ...
"Are you happy with the filming?"
"What do you mean, happy?"
"Well do you think it's interesting?"
"What do you mean, interesting?"—Roger Waters, being interviewed by Adrian Maben in 1972
It honestly reminds me of something(s) CJ would say.
IN BLOOM: We went on a nice long walk today, a couple of miles, at least. We saw crocus popping up, some small petals on some heather-like plants (complete with bees) and tiny buds on a few roses. Spring is a comin'!
The kids enjoyed a couple of playgrounds along our journey.
And we enjoyed a lot of lovely scenery. Here's a glimpse of Puget Sound through some trees at a (shade) dark park.
We spied a kite caught in a tree in a wind-whipped park along Elliott Bay. Note to kite flyers: seek wide open spaces.
Speaking of 'in bloom' (the sub head of this section), today would have been Kurt Cobain's 47th birthday. What a tortured, talented soul he was. Love this video for "In Bloom," clearly a tribute to The Beatles on Ed Sullivan
Photo: NASA MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: A day after being dispatched from the International Space Station, the first operational Orbital Sciences Corp. Cygnus resupply craft re-entered Earth's atmosphere today and burned up over the South Pacific Ocean. The fire was by design - Cygnus is not recyclable. Along for the fiery end were 3,250 pounds of ISS trash, opening up some elbow room on the orbiting research lab. LIVE! FROM SEATTLE: Here's a link to a Web cam up high on the Space Needle - http://www.spaceneedle.com/webcam/ Yes, a lot of times clouds are going to obscure your view, but on some days, including today, it's a lovely view.
DEBATABLE: This evening, we watched some of the debate between Bill Nye ('The Science Guy') and Ken Ham, founder and CEO of Kentucky’s Creation Museum. (The Web site for that museum is an eye opener, BTW. Yowza.)
About 10 minutes into it, I heard CJ mutter, "He's insane" when Ham tried to explain that animals were vegetarian pre-Noah's ark times. (Bill Nye begged to differ, pointing out that, for instance, lions' teeth were clearly not designed for grazing on broccoli.) CJ face palmed so many times, I think he probably has a sprained wrist. Or a sprained face.
YES, AGAIN: We spent hours in West Seattle working on wood floors again today, and that's all I'll say, except that my body is getting used to construction and I'm not as hobbled as I was, which is awesome!
STING AND SIMON: Tonight,We the adults in the household had a field trip close to home, to Key Arena to see Paul Simon and Sting perform. The place was nearly sold out, and it was a Baby Boom crowd, for sure. I felt like a spring chicken for a change. ;)
They're each immensely talented entertainers, and together they made some magic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt5YSZOqyUg
HERE COMES THE SUN: I wanted to start off with something pretty, and I'd say this photo taken by an Expedition 35 crew member on board the International Space Station in May of last year certainly works.
When it was taken, the ISS was 27.4 degrees south latitude and 110.1 degrees west longitude, a few hundred miles east of Easter Island. When you're on board the ISS, you get to see 16 sunrises in 24 hours! HIGH FIBER DIET: Nothing to see here, move along, move along ... That's what happens to a blog when you spend 13 hours working on wood floors in a day.
As I was on my hands and knees in hour 12, inhaling the off gasses from oil based stain with the scent of polyurethane wafting in from the other room, I contemplated how many brain cells I'd killed today. Probably too many to count.
I told Rick that I was liable to be weaving on the way home. Fortunately, I did make it home without incident.
Tomorrow should be easier, because WE ARE DONE SANDING. As I sit here, I can feel wood chips in my mouth, I kid you not. And was WITH being fastidious about wearing a mask. But as of tonight, the master bedroom is sanded, stained and polyurethaned, the living room is sanded and stained, and the kitchen is sanded. By tomorrow night, the living room will be poly coated and the kitchen will be stained and sanded. Hoo-RAY. And then, I will have more compelling things to share. Hopefully.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: A friend shared with me this photo today ... The gentleman looked vaguely familiar ... but I couldn't put a name to the face. Can you? It's Stephen Hawking. I love seeing this photo of him. Until now, I've never pictured him in any other way than as a brilliant but withered man in a wheelchair. His life story is so amazing. Some doctors told him to drop out of college, because it would be a waste of his time to finish, because he'd never live to earn his degree or work in any meaningful way. Here he is, decades later, considered one of the world's preeminent theoretical physicists of all time. AABA: We took our first quiz tonight for out Beatles class. A few of the questions had to do with the AABA song format, not to be confused with ABBA, the '70s sensational band from Sweden who churned out hits like "Dancing Queen" and "Fernando." ;) AABA is verse, verse chorus. Most all of The Beatles' early songs followed the formula, like 1963's "I Want to Hold Your Hand," which we watched tonight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MHkgwA8t-g
We have "Abbey Road" in heavy rotation in the car right now. Their last recorded album, from 1969, it is definitely a lot more adventurous.
ROCK ON: Saturday night the family went to Bothell to see Bottleshock, the band Rick and Kennedy are in. This was the first time CJ and Annabelle have seen them play in years, because they usually perform at a bar/club, where it's 21 and older.
The show was fun and there was a good crowd. Above, Annabelle holds up a candle during their take on "Purple Rain."
LONG AND HARD: Saturday, Sunday and Monday, we spent hours and hours and hours in West Seattle, working on refinishing Rick's hardwood floors (with the emphasis on HARD!) They'd been abandoned and abused for 80 plus years, but we think they have a little life left in them.
We had to patchwork the kitchen floor together, stealing boards from here and there to get a (mostly) solid floor. Here's what it looked like pre-sanding.
Speaking of sanding, Annabelle gave it a shot. CJ wasn't interested in trying.
The living room floor is looking pretty darn good at this point - pre stain.
And tonight around 9:30, Rick and I finished staining the bedroom floor a color called "Kona." It's a nice, rich brown (this photo makes it look a little reddish).
We'll be back at it tomorrow, a bit more sanding and a whole lot of staining to do! GOLDFISH DRIVING: I'm beat, so that's it for now, but I leave you with this ...
http://youtu.be/YbNmL6hSNKw
HEARTS ON HIGH: It's Valentine's Day, so hearts abound! Above is a photo of the aptly named Heart Nebula. It's about 7500 light years away from Earth, in the Perseus Arm of the Galaxy in constellation Cassiopeia. There are lots of lovely photos of this nebula out there - just Google 'heart nebula images' if you care to see more.
Here's a heart seen from on high. It's a photo NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg took during her most recent stint on the International Space Station.
Image credit: Karen Nyberg/NASA
TESTED: "Stress! Stress! Stress! Stress! Oh my god, stress!" Annabelle declared just before launching the timed genetics and evolution midterm test this afternoon.
We've spent several hours studying for the test, and a lot is on the line, as it accounts for about half of our grade in the course.
We each had 90 minutes to take the test from the time you log in. To say it didn't go well would be an understatement.
Almost immediately, my computer crashed, HARD. It took forever to reboot. Calculators wouldn't work. Dogs barked. There were multiple questions we've never seen before in any form. The printer crashed from its shelf to the hardwood floor. Annabelle became hysterical. CJ turned into a zombie.
Such fun! And that was only the first half of the test.
Afterward, we reviewed what went very, VERY badly, and what went well (I think our math was sound, and we each did get every question answered. I pointed out to them the second half of the test almost HAS to go better, but that we're not doing it today. Enough is enough!
SUNNY STROLL: We dedicated all of today to getting caught up on our music and genetics classes, but we did take about an hour out to take a nice long stroll down to Fishermen's Terminal.
There must not be much of anything in season in the Bering Sea right now, because most of the slips for the working boats were full.
We always take a moment to visit the memorial at the terminal. And every time there's something there that gets me. Today, it was a baseball. Pitchers and catchers reported to spring training yesterday, and someone clearly brought an old baseball down to their baseball loving loved one to mark the occasion.
On our way back home, I couldn't believe my eyes when I spied a few clusters of daffodils blooming along a public parking strip on 24th Avenue. They are by far our first daffodil sighting of the year! We admired them for a couple minutes and didn't pick a single one, so others could enjoy them as well.
THE BEAT BROS.: We got back to our Beatles course, of course. Part of what we learned about today was about The Beatles clubbing it big time in Hamburg in their formative years, 1960 and 1961. George was only 17! They would play six sets a night sometimes (which led to popping 'diet pills' for energy, our professor tells us). While they were there, they recorded an album (and single of the same name) with Tony Sheridan on lead. For the project, they opted not to use the name The Beatles, as it sounds like a slang word for male genitalia in German. And so, the four were "The Beat Brothers" supporting Sheridan on "My Bonnie."
The single sharing the album's name starts the song off traditionally, but after the first verse it turns into a rockin' version that sounds very much like, well, early Beatles music.
http://youtu.be/gr35lAvW8PY
Today's lecture covered music and musicians who were popular in Hamburg while The Beatles were there. We learned 'schlager' (loosely translated as 'a hit') was a style of music hot in Hamburg. And today we were introduced to a guy named Ted Herold, supposedly Germany's Elvis. (After watching a video of him - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c58lJK9L51c, I'll stick with the U.S. version, thank you, thankyouverymuch.) Ironically of dozens and dozens of Herold videos to choose from, I randomly picked one called "Die Besten Sterben Jung." Guess those three years of German in high school didn't pay off, I had no idea what that meant. At one point Ted stopped singing and started rattling off names like Jim, Janis, and Elvis. That got me to Googling the song's title, turns out it means "the best die young."
We also listened to an instrumental track, "Wonderland by Night," from Bert Kaempfert, "Germany's Herb Alpert." The horns-heavy song hit number one in the U.S. for a few weeks in 1960. Kaempfert was the one who hired The Beatles to back Sheridan on "My Bonnie," by the way. And in another random factoid, now I know whom the Barenaked Ladies were talking about in their hit "One Week" when they said "Bert Kaempfert's got the mad hits!"
So far, it has really been enjoyable being enticed to listen to music we'd otherwise never hear, and get a better sense of the formative years of the Fab Four.
HOW BIG?: A friend's Facebook post tipped me off to a BBC Web site where you can get a good idea how large mammoth objects are, relatively speaking.
I put a purple arrow (center frame) pointing to our copper colored roof.
Clearly, the ISS is a big ol' spacecraft.
CJ was rather horrified about our odds of surviving if it landed on our block, but I reminded him, the ISS was not constructed to Earth gravity specs - it would crumple if it were here on the ground. So maybe, just maybe, we'd escape being totally obliterated.
The "How Big Really?" site has a whole list of fun comparisons, divided by categories, like "Space" and "Environmental Disasters"
CRAMMING: We spent a couple of hours studying for our genetics midterm today. I was mostly happy with our review, but we all pretty much failed miserably when it came to remembering how to infer the phase of alleles in a heterozygous parent, infer the gene order and then determine the recombination factors. Tonight, after reviewing a couple of lectures, I'm feeling more confident. We'll give it another go tomorrow. I'd love to be able to take at least half of the test tomorrow (it's broken up into two 90-minute segments).
WELL PLAYED: Bad weather has been attacking a wide swath of the US this winter, closing businesses and canceling classes. Kudos to administrators who are getting creative with their school closure notices.
