Sound and Vision

AD ASTRA: Sad news this morning. Humankind has lost a great one, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first person to ever complete an extravehicular activity (spacewalk). 

We had the absolute pleasure of seeing him in person in September of 2012, during a Museum of Flight event. He told an absolutely captivating account of his spacewalk. What an experience that was! That day Leonov also shared an emotional account of his close friend Yuri Gagarin's death, and how Gagarin was unfairly blamed for the accident.

Above is a photo I took of him (and his daughter, who translated for him) on that fantastic occasion. 

In addition to being an astronaut, Leonov was a diplomat, a writer and an artist. 

Note: Yes, I see that his name is spelled Alexey on the placard above, but everywhere else I've seen it, it's Alexei, so not sure what was up with that.

SEEING IS BELIEVING: Presently via CJ's psychology course, we're learning about how our senses affect us. Recently, we've watched two really interesting videos about individuals who see using input other than their eyes.

First, we watched a short video about a gentleman who uses a device on his tongue to help visually interpret the world around him. As he explains near the start of the video, "Your brain is what sees, not your eyes." 

Check out this video about the Brainport Vision Device. It's pretty remarkable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNkw28fz9u0&list=PLAC1C3F4A365958A8&index=6&t=5s

We also viewed an episode from the series "Extraordinary People" about Ben Underwood, a boy who lost his eyesight to cancer as a toddler. Underwood managed to develop a way to 'see' using echolocation. It's fascinating. (The episode can be seen here: https://archive.org/details/youtube-TB_yrWppP0c.)

The show was filmed 12 years ago, when Underwood was 14. We were curious how he was doing now. I pictured him touring from city to city, as a motivational speaker and teacher of his echolocation method. I suggested CJ Google "Ben Underwood echolocation." 

About 10 seconds later, CJ reported devastating news. Just two years after the episode aired, the cancer that stole young Underwood's eyesight ended up killing him. We all felt so sad upon hearing this, and kinda wished we weren't so darn curious by nature.

Here's a short Sacramento Bee video, narrated by his mother, about Ben's life. In 2014 her book about Ben, "Echoes on an Angel," was released.


SING SONG: We continue to try to learn hiragana, characters used in Japanese writing. CJ's professor suggested a couple of videos, including this one. ... 

Watching it, I asked, "Why does she have to sing it so damn fast?" I mean, if you're a beginner, speed is not your friend.

Then there is this version. It kind of sounds like a club remix song. 

I do think this song is more manageable and might help a bit, so we'll be listening to it some more.

Make & Bake

PROXY CAKE: On Monday, our main focus was completing a birthday cake for Rick's birthday - kind of. 

Rick lives in Vegas now, so he wouldn't be tasting, or even seeing in person, the cake we were making for him. However, as regular readers know, we like to donate cakes to kids in local homeless shelters via one of our favorite charities, Birthday Dreams. So, we went on their website and chose the cake request we thought Rick would like best if he were still a little boy.

When I saw a youngster wanted a superhero cake, I knew that was the one we had to do for Rick. he was all about super hero action figures when he was young.

We decided to incorporate elements of the Big Three into the cake. We covered the cake board in red fondant and carved a spider web into it as a nod to Spider-Man.

The cake's bottom layer was vanilla cake covered in buttercream tinted silver and decked out Batman style. The top 'cake' layer was actually a giant Krispies treat covered in homemade marshmallow fondant. 

For both layers, the e belts are from fondant we made, the capes are sculpted from modeling chocolate we made, as are the cake toppers. The logos are cut from from a sugar sheets.

We also put the cake recipient's name on the cake board, but left it off for confidentiality reasons prior to this photo.

With every cake we donate, I make up a little cake tutorial, so whoever is serving it knows what's what ingredient wise, as well as what's hiding inside structurally.

This cake was a fun one. We hope both boys (Rick and the young recipient) liked it!

JARRING: Tuesday night we *finally* got around to jarring the honey we extracted from a couple of our hive's frames last week. The bowl below shows how much our 'haul' was (9 ounce bear jar for scale).

We are lucky that there's a jar wholesaler down in the Sodo district of Seattle, which is conveniently located for us. We went there a couple days back and scored some honeycomb shaped jars at a reasonable price.

We scooped the honey out of the bowl and let it stream into the jars.

 It wasn't the quickest process, but it was relaxing in a way.

 It's kind of mesmerizing watching the honey slowly run into the vessels.

We were very careful while filling the jars, not wanting to waste a single, precious drop of the special stuff!

TEST KITCHEN: The fourth Saturday of most every month, we help serve dinner at a shelter for homeless young adults and teens. This month the service will be close to Halloween, so we pitched a sorta spooky menu including "Halloweenies" (mummy wrapped hot dogs) and screaming beans (spicy baked beans).

Tuesday night, we gave a couple of recipes a test run.

We were mostly happy with them. You have to love the Instant Pot pressure cooker. You can go from dry beans to this (below) in about two hours. Remarkable!

SOMETHING TO CHEW ON: The headline was one you don't see every day. The tease notification from Space.com read, "Meat Grown in Space for the First Time Ever."

I had to click on that.

On October 7, Aleph Farms, an Israeli food company, announced that its experiment aboard the International Space Station resulted in the first-ever lab-grown meat in space. 

Here's a Roscosmos photo of the cosmonaut with the space meat.

The company grows lab "cultivated beef steaks," which is an entire piece edible meat from just a couple of cells. On the ISS a 3D bioprinter was used.  In the contraption, "animal cells, are mixed with growth factors and the material 'bioink,' and 'printed' into a layered structure," per Space,com's article.  

No mention of whether the meat was eaten and how it tastes. The article's subhead did note, however, that the cultivated meat is "slaughter-free." That's something to think about. 

Making Progress

TIS THE SEASON: Fall is definitely in the air, with cool nights and spiders everywhere.

Dozens of little green tomatoes are hanging on for dear life, and we harvested all of our spaghetti squash this weekend. It was a bumper crop of squash - over a dozen in total, I do believe, all from just a couple of tiny seeds. Hard to believe!

WORK IN PROGRESS: A busy weekend around here. Work on our basement continues, and I'm happy to report we have all of the new flooring installed. Hooray!

Meanwhile, upstairs work has included a cake donation project for Birthday Dreams. Can you guess its theme? 

COLLEGE UPDATE:  Week two of college is in the books for CJ and he seems to have hit his stride, doing well on written assignments and tests.  Speaking of tests, while he didn't ace his first week of history, this week was a different story, thanks to an improved approach. In addition to taking notes while he read the textbook chapters, we discovered a website called Quizlet. There, you can find flashcard and other types of quizzes for most any textbook. It's amazing - and it's free!

Quizlet purports to have over 300 million (!) study sets online, and reports more than 50 million users from over 130 countries each month.

Fortunately, it has tests for the text CJ is using for history. He used the flashcards to prep, and it really worked. He scored 100 percent with relative ease this go round, so hooray for that!

SO FAR, SO GOOD: Annabelle has managed to complete a drawing for each day of InkTober so far. Here are three of her latest creations.  The prompt for the one below was "Freeze."

 The self-constructing robot was drawn for the theme "Build."

 The corny dog was drawn for the prompt "Husky."

Artsy

InkTober: Above is Annabelle's latest drawing for the InkTober challenge. It's an interesting interpretation for the drawing prompt "bait."

LECTURED: Thursday morning, we turned our attention the the history and importance of functional Magnetic Resonace Imaging. If you have some time to kill and want to learn a bunch, you can check out a 40-some minute presentation on the topic (link below). (Pro tip: You can turn the closed captions on and watch it at double speed if you're pressed for time.)


We also learned about Nobel Prize winner Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934). A gifted artist born to a Professor of Applied Anatomy, Cajal was compelled to follow in those footsteps. He made his way through medical school and went on to teach, as well. In 1887, Cajal was appointed Professor of Histology and Pathological Anatomy at Barcelona. He published numerous articles and books, but his love of art never waned. 

Fortunately for the world, Cajal married his medical knowledge with his artistic talents. He spent countless hours hunched over a microscope, and created phenomenal drawings of neuroanatomy (long before MRIs were a thing).

Check out his schema of visual map theory (1898). 

O=Optic chiasm; C=Visual (and motor) cortex; M, S=Decussating pathways; R, G: Sensory nerves, motor ganglia.

Cajal seemed to especially enjoy drawing Purkinje cells. They're denoted as "A" in the drawing below, while "B" is granule cells. Both are from a pigeon's cerebellum. 

I just love this selfie of Cajal in a laboratory.

Some of his work reminds me of mid-century modern designs. 

So far we're just loving learning more about neuroscience!

REGULARS: In yesterday's post I mentioned spying a spotted towhee near our bird feeder a couple days back. I thought it was the first time I saw it, but now I'm guessing it has been there as long as our feeder has (a few months). I say this because I see it several times a day now that I know what I'm looking for.

He swoops down out of the shrubs (where potted towhees like to hang out), takes a couple bites and makes a hasty retreat.  (Below is a crummy photo through a glass door at considerable distance.)

His skittish behavior is unlike the starling jays who basically camp out under the feeder and dare other birds to partake. 

Lots of Learning

INKTOBER: A couple of days ago, I asked Annabelle if she was going to participate in InkTober again this year. She said she'd forgotten all about it, but was enthusiastic about giving it a go.

Created by artist Jake Parker, InkTober has been a thing for ten years now. It's two primary rules are "be nice" and "have fun." Those seem like decent guidelines. :)

So far, Annabelle has drawings for October 1 and 2. The first day's theme was "ring." Her creation for that is above. Day 2 was "mindless." She went zombie for that topic.

If you're curious, here's the 'official' list of drawing prompts for the month ahead.

BABY STEPS: We've spent a fair amount of the last 48 hours learning Hiragana. Or, should I say, trying to learn Hiraganga, a Japanese syllabary that's one part of the Japanese writing system. Hiragana is akin to the Japanese alphabet. It represents every sound in the language.

Learning Hiragana is not the easiest thing to do, if you asked me. I think CJ would agree. (For whatever reason, Annabelle seems to have it down cold lickety split. I have to wonder if that's because she spends so much time each day doodling and drawing, that memorizing these little shapes that represent the Japanese language is a snap for her.)

Anyway, it's really like being back at square one, in your first day of preschool, trying to learn your ABCs. (Except maybe it's harder now, because my aged brain isn't as spongy as it used to be?)

We've been using textbooks and worksheets from CJ's class, and turned to YouTube in hopes of finding a catchy song or something that would help. That search didn't provide very fruitful. Example? If you're interested, here's a video that promises you will "master Hiragana in 10 minutes."

Having watched it twice now, I'm just gonna straight up say, they lie.

CJ has a quiz tonight on Hiragana, and he's a little bit ... well, maybe a LOT bit ... nervous about it. I told him he can only do the best he can, and that will be good enough for now. Meanwhile, we'll keep practicing and maybe find a better video. ;)

We've been trying to practice in a variety of ways (online flash cards and memory games, writing them on white boards and paper, and even saying the names of the characters while moving in different manners. For instance, the photo below might make it look like the kids are Kung Fu Fighting, but they're really just alternating arm motions while saying Hiragana names.

VIBRANT VISITOR: A couple of days ago, I looked out the back window (the one in the photo above, actually), and saw a pretty little bird at the feeder. It was just there for a couple of moments, but I got a pretty good look at it. Annabelle entered the area, and I described it to her, saying it looked kind of like a robin, in that its back and wings were mostly black, and that it's belly was red. However, the red and black were more saturated or dramatic than a robin. It also had some distinctive white spots, I noted.

Annabelle scooped up our "Birds of Seattle and Puget Sound" book and started flipping through its pages. Within just a few seconds she found the page for the Towhee. Bingo! That was it. 

Turns out it's a big sparrow, and rather secretive in behavior. Perhaps that's why I couldn't recall having seen one before. I wonder how often it's hanging out in our shrubs. 

Harvest Day

FIRST HARVEST: If you follow along here, you know that we have a couple of beehives. The bees within the hives seem healthy and prolific. They've produced multiple frames of honey. While we need to leave most of it so they have food stores for winter, we felt like it was OK to extract a little for ourselves at this point. 

To do so, we acquired this manually-operated centrifuge-type extractor. You simply put a couple of honey-laden frames in it and spin away.

But first, you have to carefully scrape the wax caps off of the honeycomb.

Then, the racks go in and they're ready to spin!

It requires cranking as fast as possible, as demonstrated below.

We didn't net much honey from our first harvest. Maybe a couple of cups or so. But boy is it delicious!

HARVEST, TOO: Yesterday was another harvest around the homestead. The kids picked a half dozen spaghetti squash from our enormous vine. 

There are still a couple of green-tinged squash out there. Hopefully we'll get enough sun to help nudge them toward yellow in the next couple of weeks.

TINY HOME: Friday afternoon, I took the kids to the Burien branch of King County Public Libraries so that they could participate in a terrarium building class. 

All of the materials were provided by the library, which was swell. 

The kids assembled them step-by-step, from the bottom up. Annabelle's finished product is in the photo above. CJ's is in the photo below.

HOMEWORK: Naturally, a lot of what we did today, and what we do every day now, is make sure CJ's on track with his college work. 

Annabelle's curriculum now pretty much consists of shadowing CJ's coursework. And if you read this blog, that means you're going to be doing some of that, too. ;)

Today, we all watched a TED Talk today. Titled "My Stroke of Insight," in it, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, gives an audience a remarkably detailed, riveting account of what her stroke-in-progress experience was like. 

The video is worth a watch, IMHO.

Here are a few things Annabelle had to say about the presentation. ...

One thing I learned from Jill Bolte Taylor’s “My Stroke of Insight” TEDtalk is that the left and right hemispheres of the brain are remarkably separate and only communicate through certain areas of the brain. This can lead to situations such as Taylor’s own stroke, where the loss of communication centers in her left hemisphere left her almost completely unable to speak, read, or write. She even had trouble analyzing her situation. The brain requires information from both halves to operate at full capacity, and losing one hemisphere can be absolutely devastating for the mental processes. In her experience, losing the left brain made her lose ‘contact’ with the outside world and get lost in her own thoughts, or as she describes it, “La La Land.”

The most interesting part of her experience to me is the fact that her grasp on the English language was completely shut down due to the blood clot placing pressure on that area of the brain. She admitted that the only way she was able to use the telephone call for help was by matching the ‘squiggles’ (numbers) on her own business card to the corresponding shapes on the dial pad. When someone finally picked up the phone, she was able to hear them, but did not understand what was being said; it simply sounded like a garbled mess. As she tried to reply, her own words were also slurred beyond comprehension. Having to communicate with other people when you cannot understand them, nor can they understand you, must have been a massive challenge.

Oh, So Busy

LONG LIVE THE KING: It's been a week. So much stuff. Some of the best stuff was last Thursday night. Memories that will last a lifetime. ...We simply *had* to go to the Mariners' game, as it was the last start ever for "The King," pitching ace Felix Hernandez.

"King Felix" has been pitching for the Mariners since he was a chubby cheeked 19-year-old, back in 2005. That means he has been a Mariners' pitcher as long as CJ and Annabelle can remember. Heck, as long as I can remember, too. ;)

A rare talent, Felix's prowess prompted a "King's Court" to be created at Safeco (T-Mobile) Field for every start. For his last start, it was the biggest King's Court ever.

He's kind of a big deal. 

Even before Felix took the field, the crowd was in a frenzy.

The best was making his final start. I can't believe I'll never hear, "#34, Felix Hernandez" announced as our starting pitcher ever again. 

For one last time Felix made his way to the dugout pre-game.

It was an emotionally charged moment as he took the mound for the last time in Seattle.

When he reached the mound, Felix took a bow.

Everything about the night was a first and/or a last.

His last bullpen session. His last walk from the bullpen to the dugout. His last pre-game descent into the dugout.

His last walk to the mound in the first inning.

His last first pitch.

And eventually, his last meeting at the mound.

 And with that, he was bid adieu. 
 As the saying goes, "There's no crying in baseball." 

 Thursday night was one of those exceptions to the rule. 

It was an emotional night. 

A lot of people left when Felix was pulled, but I thought we should stick around. I suspected he'd be back out at the end of the game. During the 9th inning, I saw security heading toward the field right in our section and I thought, "Oh boy, we gotta get down to the field!" 

So, I whisper yelled at the kids and Christian to go go go!  and we 'upgraded' our seats by about 20 rows, to down just about 3 rows from the field. Sure enough, when the game was over, we saw him approaching. Here he comes!

Things happened really fast and I was in the crush of the crowd. People were jostling and posters were hoisted. First, I got just Felix's left arm.

Then, a shot of his right arm.

 Finally, I got a photo of both arms. ;)

But eventually, I got lucky and got the "money" shots. Felix's face, full of emotion.

  I could see the tears in his eyes. 

It was a night to remember, and I'm so glad we were there. 

FOOD FOLLIES: A good part of Friday and Saturday were devoted toward feeding others.

Friday morning, we made an enormous batch of soup base for what we'd be serving Saturday night at Teen Feed.

The food service was going to feature a half dozen different kinds of soup. We chose to bring a hearty tomato soup. We kinda followed the recipe (link preceding), but left out the beans, doubled the carrots, added celery, and fancied it up with toppings of a generous amount of bacon, a handful of homegrown tomatoes from our garden, and some grilled cheese croutons (an entire grilled cheese sandwich cut into cubes, served on the side for them to add into the soup, dip, or just pop into their mouths).

To say the soup was a hit would be an understatement. We made about four gallons of it, including vegan and onion-free versions, and it was all consumed during our one hour dinner service. 

Saturday, cheesecake creation was also on the menu, for a special birthday the following day.

Annabelle made the whole thing herself, mostly following good ol' Instant Pot New York Cheesecake #17 by Amy + Jacky. She pre-baked the crust (a pretzel crust, as opposed to the graham cracker traditional one) and then cooked the whole works in a pressure cooker, if you can believe that. Sunday morning, we topped it, using raspberry jam in a piping bag, and added raspberries we'd dipped in dark chocolate.

It did not disappoint.

BEELINE: Sunday was another busy day. Activities included a field trip ... to our house!

We had visitors over to check out our bee hives. They run a non-profit  that works toward eliminating the use of plastic, and to that end, they encourage people to use beeswax-coated cloth as a sub for Saran Wrap.

They definitely got a close-up look at some beeswax during their visit!

CRASH COURSES: The dearth of posts last week is due to "our" first week of full time college. 

CJ is taking three classes, two of which are online. While I thought the online classes would be easier (no commute, no set time), they are actually kind of a lot more work, because there are so many parts to them. It's like "watch this video here, check out this PowerPoint here, post to this forum here, respond to a post there, check out the online 'watercooler,' make sure you follow this discussion thread ..."

And none of that is the actual reading or assignments or quizzes for the class. It's a lot to keep track of, and it would be easy to miss something.

Add to that the fact that the first writing assignments were due this week and CJ had to re-acquaint himself with the proper way to cite articles, websites, textbooks, videos, and more. That, alone, was an hours-long process.

While he was strongly advised (by me) to take notes while reading his history textbook chapters, CJ chose not to do so. That choice was reflected in the score of his first history quiz. (He didn't fail, but he was far from acing it.) Lesson learned, hopefully. Also, it won't just be strong advice from me this week, it will be a requirement that he jot down at least some notes. 

Regarding his writing assignments, I came up with a flow chart of sorts to help remind him the steps in the process.

To CJ's credit, I should point out that he got 100 percent on his first Japanese quiz, a class for which he has been taking copious, careful notes. ;)