Spirit Animal

NEW MASCOT:  So, the green guy above. He's ours. For whatever reason, I felt compelled to make him ours when I saw an eBay auction from Seattle Goodwill. I put in the minimum bid, and (believe it or not!) no one else bid on him. Shocking, I know (ha ha).

What will we do with a suit like that? I really don't know. We think he might make appearances at friends of MPA's schools. We know many a teacher here at MPA. :) 

We also feel compelled to quickly learn how to do a backflip. And slam dunk off a trampoline. Or at the very least, as least muster a decent cartwheel. ... So we need to add gymnastics to our curriculum. Stay tuned. ;)

GOT HIS FILL: Today it was announced that astronaut Scott Kelly, who just came home from a nearly one year mission on the International Space Station, will be hanging up his spacesuit for good.

   Photo of Scott Kelly on an EVA/space walk: NASA

Kelly announced his retirement effective April 1, after 20 years with NASA. 

As of now he holds the record for the American with the most time in space (consecutive and non consecutive). And who knows, maybe someday he'll go back as a space tourist. 

RAILROAD TYCOONS:  We recently acquired a new-to-us game. Railroad Tycoon is an 'empire building' type game, based around railroad lines of the 1800s. 

We haven't played it yet (it's pretty intense/complicated), but we kicked the tires today. The cool thing is, we already learned a little history by reading some of the railroad baron cards. 

For instance, we learned about Daniel Drew. We'd never heard of him before, but it turns out the businessman had almost a lifetime of success, followed by "utter failure and hopeless bankruptcy" per one biographer.

In fact, apparently Drew is the dude who is responsible for introducing the concept of 'watered stock' to Wall Street, which resulted in a dilution of ownership. Not the best legacy.

Trials

TEST KITCHEN:  So, the kids each have their hearts set on entering a cooking contest for those their age.  If you're a regular reader, you know we spend a fair amount of time kicking 'round the kitchen, playing with our food. It's one thing cooking for yourself. It's another, submitting an original recipe to a national competition. 

I'm going to get to specific as to the specs here so as not to tip the kids' hands to the competition too much. ;) That said, CJ decided he wanted to make a meat cake. Because meat. And cake. What's not to love?!

It involved meat ... Specifically, two ground pounds. 

and chopping lots of fruit and vegetables to exacting standards ... 

The hardest part of today's challenge was not winging it. We cook so much, we know what we like and what tastes good and have a "feel" for proportions. But "feelings" don't fly well when one's submitting a recipe to a national competition. It requires exacting measurements. Sometimes that involved accidentally dumping half a tin of white pepper onto a spoon. And sometimes that was followed by dumping a half a bottle of garlic salt onto same said half teaspoon. But I digress. ... 

Eventually the meat 'cakes' were done ...

And the 'icing (sweet and Yukon gold potatoes and other secret ingredients, including a half pound of white pepper) were mashed and ready to apply.

The layers were stacked with potato 'icing' in between, and then it was time for a crumb coat.

 
Then it was time to pretty it up a bit (not too much this go 'round, as this was a rough version mostly for proportion and tasting purposes). Next, CJ practiced his piping skills.  

He did pretty well. 

And it tasted pretty good. We talked about tweaks that need to be made and CJ has good notes for the next go 'round. It will be a little lighter on the white pepper, hopefully.

CLARA: Thanks to the Google Doodle, we learned that today is the (105th) birthday of the virtuoso of Theremin players, Clara Rockmore.  Here's a super short primer of her accomplishments; 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/03/08/clara-rockmore-the-story-of-the-theremin-virtuoso-who-inspired-l/

OMG LOOK AT THAT: So, that eclipse visible mostly only in Indonesia yesterday? Turns out you could also see it from an Alaska Airlines flight. You really should watch this. Worth enduring it until the end. :)
https://youtu.be/YBoa81xEvNA

Beaming

SPRING STROLL:  The rain stayed at bay most of today, so we squeezed a short walk in this afternoon.

We couldn't help but admire signs of spring popping up all over. There were too many daffodils to count, and sweet little flowers from other bulbs were everywhere.

We also stopped to admire this little lending library, cleverly crafted out of an old dollhouse!

MEANWHILE, HALFWAY AROUND THE WORLD: This afternoon I read aloud that there was a total solar eclipse, visible in Indonesia.

Annabelle only heard the first part and started scurrying around to find our sun-safe viewing glasses, until I repeated the "Indonesia" part loudly.

Here, from ScienceAtNASA, is a short video about the event.

https://youtu.be/MQjPFwcjh9c 

And here's what it looked like - if you were in Indonesia.

    photo: NASA TV

LEFTOVERS: I rather lamely managed to miss including CJ's review of Polar Science Weekend at Pacific Science Center in yesterday's post. Here it is, without further ado. 

For every year since 2005, the Pacific Science Center has held the Polar Science Weekend event, where several UW researchers and a couple Coasties (Coast Guard members) run booths relating to their research and scientific discoveries at both the North and South poles. Although there are booths that are there every year, with every year, there are also new and interesting ones. One example of a new booth was a section dedicated to research of fishes' diets, what the food chain looks like, and stomachs. On a tray with different fish carcasses, we got to see what a small fish looked like at different stages of digestion, and we learned that some sea-snails could survive when they would be digested by staying in their shell. In a jar, we also got to see what a large (and rather disgusting) fish stomach looked like. As usual, we took the Salinity Taste Test, where we would taste-test different sources of water, with salt contents equivalent to different fluids. One had salt equivalent to human blood, another to the world average salt amount for oceans, and the saltiest by far was equivalent to the Red Sea.

This year's Polar Science Weekend was very fun, and I look forward to seeing what is at the next Polar Science Weekend.

OVERHEARD: CJ and Annabelle were struggling with a math problem about converting Earth weight vs. the same weight on Mars. After a couple of starts and stutters, I heard Annabelle say, "Let's see if we can figure out a way to reverse engineer this."

Fortunately, they succeeded.

Polarizing

ICE, ICE, BABY:  This weekend marked what has become an annual event for us: Polar Science Weekend at Seattle Center.

It was rainy and chilly upon our arrival. A pod of (concrete) orcas was spotted in the pond outside the science center. 

Once inside, the Coast Guard had a state-of-the-art coat to help one warm up.

Our insurance company, Pemco, had a green screen opp. Here's the before ...

and here's the after ...

Here's a shot of Annabelle handling a 300-ish year old ice core.

The salinity taste test is always entertaining!

At the Ocean Watchdogs booth, we visited with a scientist who told us all about extracting samples at the North Pole. 

 The kids made origami penguins.
 They also relived narwhal experiences for not sure how many years running.

This photo makes it look like it might be CJ's last narwhal rodeo, ha ha. 

Dribbling

HOOP-DI-DO: We spent around four fun hours inside Key Arena today, taking in the quarterfinals of the Pac-12 women's NCAA basketball tournament.

We were super fortunate to score free tickets via a friend I used to work with who is family friends with an Arizona State player.  We had to send her an in-the-bowl thank you shot. :)

We watched the No. 2 seed Arizona State University take on #10 seed Cal. 

Unfortunately for ASU, they were flat out of the gate and stayed that way through four quarters. Cal took them out of the tournament in a major upset.

We walked the concourse before, between and after games. The kids took advantage of a New York Life photo opp to go for a jump ball.

There were mascots aplenty today. The kids crossed paths with a friendly Bruin. 

The kids sustained themselves between games with WAY overcooked chicken 'tenders' and WAY under-cooked 'fries.' Hooray for awful, overpriced concessions! Ha ha.

In the second game we watched, Arizona took on UCLA. The Bruins looked so polished. Well prepared and well coached, and they totally overwhelmed Arizona. 

Christian noticed a player on the Arizona team was named Griffey. I knew that Ken Griffey Jr.'s son Trey plays football for the Wildcats and surmised the woman was his sister. Sure enough, Taryn Griffey is a redshirt freshman for the basketball team. 

During the halftime of the ASU/Cal game, kids in the stands were invited down onto the court. Here's a super terrible video of that via my super terrible cell phone. CJ is about 2 o'clock in it, top right of screen in a red shirt at the fringe of the crowd. His height made it easy for me to spot him.

Terra Firma

STILL STANDING:  Look at Scott Kelly, conquering gravity like a boss!

Just a few hours after returning to Earth after a 340-day absence (while on board the ISS), Kelly was walking around, no trouble. 

Here's an awesome shot of Kelly falling back to Earth yesterday, in a remote part of Kazakhstan. 

      Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
Kelly is expected to return to Houston at about 9:55 a.m. Thursday. NASA Television will broadcast Kelly’s arrival back stateside beginning at 9:40 a.m.

Speaking of space, as we've been known to do, this afternoon, we watched the wonderful, Oscar-nominated animated short “We Can’t Live Without Cosmos.” The 15-minute (word-free) film by Konstantin Bronzit follows a pair of cosmonauts as they prepare for a space mission.

The New Yorker has posted the video on YouTube. I'm not going to post any spoilers here, other than saying, have some Kleenex ready. Sniffle.

https://youtu.be/2ClMGtB7yhc

SORRY, SEUSS:  Today is the birthday of Theodore Giesel, better known as Dr. Seuss. We've always tried to mark the day in some special way, and yesterday the kids asked for green eggs and ham as today's observance. 

Specifically, Annabelle wanted the egg to look just like the one in the book - like a 'normal' fried egg, but the yolk is green instead of white. We talked about various ways to potentially make this happen and I hit upon the idea of sprayed on food coloring we had in the cupboard. Sounded like an easy, sure bet! ... 

First, we carefully fried up a couple of eggs.

We plated them atop some ham. ...

Then, we used a shield to supposedly carefully shoot the green only onto the yolk.

And here is the horrific final product!

Bleech. 

Wouldn't want to leave you with that, so we'll leave you with this. ...

Feet on the Ground

THEY'RE BA-ACK!:  After 340 consecutive days off planet, astronaut Mark Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko have returned to Earth!

This morning, Kelly took this photograph of the last sunrise on his final day of a nearly-year-long mission.

   Photo: NASA/Scott Kelly

We watched this afternoon as the pair bid adieu to their crewmates and climbed into the Soyuz capsule that would ferry them back to the Earth's surface.

Imagine, feeling the Earth's gravity after 340 days on the International Space Station. 

                        Graphic: NASA
The New York Times recently published a story summing up Kelly's (almost) year in space by the numbers,

Kelly was on station for 10,944 sunrises and sunsets, he  made over 5,440 orbits of Earth, and traveled 143,846,525 miles (about the distance to Mars, by the way!). It's estimated Kelly drank 193 gallons of recycled urine and sweat, and he ran 648 miles (exercise is important to combat bone density loss in microgravity).

By the way, the NASA astronaut who previous held the record for longest consecutive space mission was Michael López-Alegría, who spent 215 consecutive days in space in 2006 and 2007. The man who holds the record for the all-time longest space misison is Valeri Polyakov, who was on Russian space station Mir for 438 days from 1994 to 1995. Kelly worked on more than 400 experiments, and took thousands of photos. (You can see some of his top shots here: http://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/blog/2016/03/01/20-amazing-pictures-from-astronaut-scott-kelly-s-year-in-space.asp.)


RACE:  We had a Groupon for a movie and popcorn we had to use up by yesterday, so we headed to Columbia City, the southeast part of Seattle, to Ark Lodge Cinemas, a nice vintage movie house that puts REAL BUTTER on their popcorn! Since we're sports fans and it was the last day of black history month, we chose to see movie "Race." It was a good choice. I'll let CJ tell you a bit about the movie.

"Race" is a docu-drama about Jesse Owens, an iconic Olympian who broke boundaries when he raced at the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. According to his website at jesseowens.com, Jesse began his promising athletic career began in 1928 in Cleveland, Ohio, where he set Junior High School records by clearing 6 feet in the high jump, and leaping 22 feet 11 3/4 inches in the broad jump.

Jesse Owens went to Ohio State College, and continued to practice his athleticism there. In 1935, Jesse Owens went to the Big Ten championships in Ann Arbor, where he succeeded. Jesse Owens went to the Olympics in 1936, which was troublesome, as the Nazi regime believed that black people, one of which was Jesse, were supposedly inferior to the "aryan" race.

Jesse Owens performed very well at the Olympics, winning 4 gold medals for his efforts. According to his website, he was the first American track-and-field athlete to do so. In the long jump competition, Jesse Owens was given 3 tries to do a successful jump. He was disqualified from the first 2 attempts, but a German athlete named Max Luz scrunched up his towel and placed it next to the jumping line, to show Jesse where to jump. Jesse finished and won the long jump.

Jesse Owens joined the American relay team for the Olympics for an unusual reason. The Nazi regime demanded there be no Jews on the Americans' relay team, so two of the Jewish athletes on the American team had to be taken off the team. Jesse Owens replaced one of them, but didn't want to because he felt sorry for them. He asked the Jewish athletes in question if it was okay that he replaced him, and the Jewish athletes eventually said yes.

In one of the last scenes of the film, Jesse Owens was back in New York, being the guest of honor for a banquet at an expensive hotel. Jesse, expecting more respect because he was a winning Olympic athlete and the guest of honor, attempted to enter through the normal entrance, but was turned away because he was black. He had to enter through the "colored door," a door that was not as nice as the main door. Even though he won four gold medals, Jesse Owens was never invited to the White House. 

The end of the movie was heart wrenching. Owens was such a triumph at the Olympics, and then to come home and be treated so poorly. Fortunately, we have made progress since the mid-1930s.

Here's a trailer for "Race." Catch it if you can.

https://youtu.be/E31LnSw47xo