Quick Update

THE COUNTDOWN'S ON: Like so many others, we are counting down the days until the election. We decided to do so literally and I ordered a DIY advent calendar.

Annabelle used her Cricut to cut out numbers for the drawers. She also cut out letters for the sentiment in the middle of the calendar.

Now, we just need to figure out what to put in the little drawers. I bought some chocolate coins tonight at Winco. They are blue foil with an eagle on one side and John F. Kennedy on the other side. I thought they would be perfect! I was wrong. They're just a tad too big, darn it. Now we have 50 blue foil covered coins we don't need and nothing for our little drawers. The search continues.

TRAGEDY: Remember me crowing about finally having one little pumpkin growing in our garden? We were so excited.

Well, yeah, pox on that. I took the dogs out yesterday morning and went to check on our pumpkin and found it has become detached from the vine. Nooooooooo!

I'm blaming the dogs. They like to walk along the wall and I'll be one of them knocked it off the vine. Drat!

In happier news, we do still have a few flowers around, including a couple of dahlias, some poppies, the clover is blooming again, among other bright spots. We also picked a couple dozen more tiny red tomatoes.

So there's our gardening round up. 

And So It Continues

DIGGING IT: So, here we are again, blogging about nothing other than planting stuff. Not that there's anything wrong with planting, per se, but there are WHOLE lot of things we'd like to be doing in addition to that, but COVID. Sigh.

Anyway, a few weeks ago a friend messaged me a photo of a cute pumpkin planter stuffed with succulents. I tucked that away in my mind and this week we go around to creating some of our own.

We scored a couple of cute, vibrantly orange pumpkins for $2 apiece at Grocery Outlet. We hollowed those out.

Then we filled them with potting soil and went 'shopping' in our yard, where there are so many succulents growing.

I don't have photos of our scavenging, but I do have photos of the finished product. Below is CJ's planter. Isn't it pretty?

And here's Annabelle's succulent stuffed pumpkin. So pretty!

SCIENCE CLASS: CJ has started his sophomore year of college. One of his classes is biology. There are a few things about the course that are already red flags for me, but I'm trying to stay open minded.

In the meantime, the kids started a controlled experiment today involving planting and growing mung beans.

The first step was potting soil in four pots.

The dirt was supposed to be within an inch of the pot's top.

The mung beans were planted at a precise depth,

The seeds are germinating even as we 'speak.' Once they sprout, there will be some controls and variables employed. 

Signs of the Times

PLUGGING ALONG: This week, we've been doing the best we can with what we have to work with. We have no Internet, and two adults who are working at home and two kids who need to do schooling 'online.'

We have limped along with our hot spots on our phones, thanks to T-Mobile. (I really am going to write them a thank you letter.)

Amidst all this, the kids entered an online art show sponsored by the Renton Arts Commission. The call asked students to share art based on their COVID experiences. 

By the way, it's worth noting they were submitted before our anti-masker in chief was diagnosed with COVID-19.

Here's what CJ shared. ... (I encourage you to click on the image to see its larger version.)

"These word clouds, shaped like the contiguous USA, contrast the terminology and vocabulary used by current President Donald Trump as compared to mainstream media reporting on the deadly pandemic. The left word cloud is composed of two articles about the reported death toll hitting the 200,000 mark: With Flags, Crosses and Photos, Mourning 200,000 Dead from the New York Times, and We’ve reached 200,000 deaths. Our response has gotten even worse than it was at 100,000 from the Washington Post. Meanwhile, the right word cloud is composed of two speeches given by Trump: On the Coronavirus Pandemic, given by Trump on March 11, and the speech he gave at the ill-fated Tulsa rally on June 20, which highly likely resulted in the COVID-19 death of Republican politician Herman Cain."

Below is what Annabelle cared to share. (Again, I would click on the image to see it in a larger scale.)

"Title: COVIDland
My visual arts entry sums up a slice of my life during the COVID-19 pandemic. My family (and others) have taken to playing many more board games to pass our pandemic times. That led me to imagine this COVID inspired parody of a classic board game, Candyland. Gloppy the chocolate swamp monster becomes Germy, who's made of hand sanitizer. Mr. Mint, or rather Mr. Mask, is complying with guidelines and wearing a face covering when in public. It was a lot of fun coming up with these silly puns in these unsettling times."

 

Spoke too Soon

LITTLE GREENIE: A couple of days ago I was lamenting the end of our gardening season and the fact that we haven't a single squash.

Imagine my surprise yesterday when taking the dogs out for their morning water when I spied this little green guy.

THE GREAT PUMPKIN!!!

It's pathetic, but we'll take it! 

CUT THE CORD: A little hiccough here. ... We worked so hard Saturday helping make 80+ meals for Teen Feed, all I wanted to do Sunday was sit and watch football. I was preparing to do just that for the Seahawks' kickoff when we lost signal.

It happened to coincide with our neighbor going gangster on trimming a tree where our fiber optic cable runs. :(

Well, accidents happen, and so we call, chat and text CenturyLink to find out they can't have a repair person out here for EIGHT DAYS!

Um, Christian and I both work at home and our kids are both doing distance learning, with CJ's college starting today. That's not acceptable.

However, that's what it is after repeated please for help. Awful, horrible and terribly inconvenient.

For now, we're limping by with hotspots on our phones, paying more for our T - Mobile, but that's not sustainable. 

$#&+@ pandemic.

So, expect even less blogging from now to who knows when. It's all via my phone for now.

Feeding Frenzy

SEASON'S FLEETING: Because of the pandemic, which means we can't go much of anywhere or do much of anything, this has pretty much turned into a gardening blog, and, ironically, it wasn't a great year for growing around here.

Our squash blossoms will be nothing more than pretty flowers, our tomatoes were small and skewed green. We had a big storm blow in at the end of last week, so I had the kids go out and pick what they could before the rains came. Guess some green tomato salsa is in our future.

TEEN TIME: This week included the fourth Saturday of the month, which meant another Teen Feed dinner. Our contribution included the kids making a couple dozen snickerdoodle cookies (they made a batch of 'regular' and a batch of vegan).

Big ol' burritos were on the menu, so we cranked out 20 pounds of chicken (Kennedy contributed another 10 pounds), and a couple friends provided even more protein. We also made four pounds of refried beans, bought dozens of tortillas and big bags of chips. (The side to the burrito was a box of nachos.)

Saturday morning we made 80 little cups of jalapenos. 

We also filled dozens of kinda big cups of salsa.

We packed the Fit to the gills and headed north about 4:30. We were the clean and prep team, staying at the shelter kitchen until about 6 p.m., when the meal service crew came in. 

Thanks to everyone's generous donations, the kitchen crew reported being able to make 120 burrito meals. Yay team!

RERUN: We posted here awhile back about a captivating presentation we sat in on, "Hidden Child of the Holocaust Shares His Story." It featured Peter Metzelaar telling his tale of being a Jewish child in hiding during WWII in Europe. You can now  watch a recording of that event on The Museum of Flight's YouTube channel.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KNXC8FtNhxM" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

You can also listen to an interview with Peter on the museum's podcast, Flight Deck, from back in March

FAR OUT FILMS: The Museum of Flight recently announced their participation in CineSpace, a virtual film screening presented by NASA and the Houston Cinema Arts Society. It features a collection of the best short films created by filmmakers of all ages. 

CineSpace is a short film competition created by NASA’s Johnson Space Center in partnership with the Houston Cinema Arts Society. Amateur and professional filmmakers share their works inspired by, and using, actual NASA imagery.

You can watch the event via the musuem's website. It runs Oct. 4-10. Registration is here: https://form.jotform.com/202585852675163

We're looking forward to checking it out.

Tales to be Told

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL: Sunday morning, we made our way to The Museum of Flight to check out their new exhibit.

The museum is doing a great job of keeping guests safe during the pandemic. Capacity at their (enormous, cavernous) place is 25 percent, and it's a timed entry. Also, we got tickets for just a half hour after opening, so it was still really quiet in the p;ace.

We made a beeline for the WWII wing and the new exhibit there. We were super startled upon entering when the man in the box started speaking to us.

The headless voice was a virtual docent. He was posted up in another part of the museum (presumably a quiet and socially distanced one). He said hello and suggested we look for a few specific things during our tour of the new exhibit. 

One good thing about the sparse crowd is you can get nice shots of planes and stuff without a bunch of people in the photo!

One of the artifacts the virtual docent told us to be on the lookout for was the camera used to take many of the now-famous aerial shots of the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

We read about photographer Lee Embree ... 

and we checked out the Graflex Speed Graphic Camera he used to capture the action at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.1

CJ has this to share about our visit to the museum on Sunday.  

Seventy five years ago this year, World War II came to a conclusion following the signing of a peace treaty between the American and Japanese governments. In commemoration of this, The Museum of Flight just unveiled its Untold Stories: World War II at 75 exhibit, presented for public viewing after months of development. Untold Stories marks the first time in 14 years that there have been any major changes to The Museum of Flight's World War II exhibit.

Despite being advertised as an overhaul of the World War II exhibit, large swathes of the exhibit were identical to its pre-renovation status. However, there were some changes I noticed. The first and most obvious one was more of an emphasis on the personal stories of World War II. It was definitely interesting reading more about the individual accounts of soldiers in the war. There was also more of an emphasis on women's World War II stories, especially in sex-segregated combat units.

One of the most novel additions was the "Virtual Docent" at the entrance to the exhibit. A large screen was set up, where a docent calling in via Zoom could talk to us and perform the functions of a typical museum docent.

There were many items of interest for us to ogle, including these flags used on aircraft carriers.  

We also checked out some noses and tails. 

We read up on helmets and jackets. 
 

Here's what Annabelle had to say about the visit ... 

The Museum of Flight’s World War 2 exhibit in the Personal Courage Wing recently underwent renovations, just reopening this Saturday. They added a number of more personal stories and items from both soldiers and civilians from multiple countries involved in the war. Some of the new items included the Graflex Speed Graphic Camera owned by Lee Embree – the very same camera that took one of the most iconic images of the attack at Pearl Harbor. 

There was also expansions and additions to the section of the wing dedicated to the women that flew in the war, including the American WASPs and ATA (Air Transport Auxiliary, who ferried supplies between factories and bases.) Many of the personal stories of women involved in the war were around the exhibit, many of which I had never heard of before. Examples include Margery Watson, one of the many women who worked on designing and drafting plans for new aircraft with the NAA.

There’s so much information in the exhibit that there’s no way I could digest all of it in one visit. My family and I plan on making many more trips to the museum to get the full experience, and I would highly recommend doing the same if you’re interested in the history of aviation and how it played such a major role in wars.

We appreciated that the museum included lots of information about the important roles women played in World War II.  

Below is as photo of a French curve. Designer Margery Watson used it to draft the under-fuselage of the F-51 Mustang.

One of the things I learned is that many of the women's corps were not official military, and, therefore, they did not qualify for veteran status or benefits after the war.

Fortunately, that wrong was righted by an act of Congress passed in 1977.

Engaging

LATE BLOOMER: The good news is, our pumpkin plant finally has beautiful blossoms. The bad news is, there's no way we're getting a pumpkin out of it this season. Sigh. Another season of pumpkin failure.

ADVENTUROUS: On Thursday afternoon, the kids participated in a three-hour workshop from MoPop (the Museum of Pop Culture). 

Annabelle has taken a couple of homeschool classes at MoPOP before, so we thought we'd give this one a go, and this time CJ participated, as well. He can tell you more about it. 

Even during the pandemic, the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) has found ways to keep visitors engaged. One of these is by hosting digital workshops for students in the Seattle area.

On September 17, MoPOP hosted a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Workshop, led by author Rebecca A. Demarest. Each participant was provided with a PDF, to make a choose-your-own-adventure story with. During the meeting, Demarest gave us all advice (and even some "writing cues") on how to write CYOA stories, and how to go from "Point A to Point B."

I wrote a brief story about a librarian who (literally) gets sucked into the world of a fantasy book. During the three hours I was given to work on the story, I incorporated four endings: One where the librarian starts a farm and lives in the fantasy world, one where the librarian passes out after waiting for help for several hours but doesn't wake up, one where the librarian gets lost in a cave, and, lastly, one where the librarian escapes the fantasy world with the help of a wizard.

While the event was enjoyable and a pleasant use of three hours, it was still a tad underwhelming.

Annabelle was supposed to send me a recap, but it seems to be missing from my inbox. I'll have to hit her up again.

SHOCKING STORY: Last week, we turned in to a live, online presentation sponsored by The Museum of Flight. It was a 90-minute talk by museum docent Peter Metzelaar.

The story we heard him tell was horrific and inspiring, terrifying and enlightening. 

In 1942, Nazis seized Metzelaar's entire family in Amsterdam except for his mother and him. For the next few harrowing years, Metaelaar and his mother struggled to stay hidden throughout the war. It was a fascinating first-person account. Here's what CJ has to say about it. ... 

For the year 2020, The Museum of Flight is hosting a commemoration titled Untold Stories: World War II at 75, dedicated to exploring the history of World War II. On September 16, The Museum hosted a virtual event where visitors were invited to listen to Peter Metzelaar, an 85-year-old Museum docent and Holocaust survivor, share his story of surviving as a Jewish child in Europe during the Holocaust.

After the event started at 6:30 P.M., Metzelaar began talking about his early life, and how, starting at age seven, he had to live in secret in the Netherlands for years on end. To quote the event's page on The Museum's website, "Aided by the Dutch Underground and his mother’s ingenuity, [Metzelaar] managed to stay hidden throughout the war."

Needless to say, Metzelaar's account of surviving a genocide in secret was harrowing. Having to, at age seven, live in secret on your relatives' barn in the rural Netherlands while there are Nazi thugs in jackboots literally looking to kill you, sounds utterly horrific.

After the end of his talk, visitors were invited to ask questions. I do recall that he was asked about his advice for children living in quarantine and isolation right now, but the fear that he had while living in isolation was obviously very different from modern day children quarantining. Unfortunately, I don't quite recall his answer to the question, but I do think the talk was worth listening to.

Here's what Annabelle had to say about the program. ...

Recently, the Museum of Flight held a virtual presentation titled “Hidden Child of the Holocaust,” hosted by Peter Metzelaar. At the beginning of the war, Peter was a 7-year-old Jewish boy in the Netherlands. When his family began disappearing one by one, leaving him with no relatives but his mother, the two of them had to go into hiding to avoid being captured by Nazi forces. They spent years hiding in the farmhouse of a Catholic couple that helped them avoid detection during raids. After spending so much time there, they had another volunteer take them into the city to live in an apartment that was much less susceptible to unannounced raids from Nazi soldiers.

Peter went to public school under the alias “Peter Pelt,” where he pretended to be of Catholic fate so as not to be discovered. He recounted stories of finding shrapnel from air raids on the streets and trading pieces with other children like trading cards. He once even found an explosive that was still live, which he chucked away just in time for it to not explode in his arms. Life in the city was dangerous, but much less so than life at the farm.

One night, he woke before the sun rose and saw his mother sewing a fake Red Cross nurse's uniform. When she finished, she explained to Peter that they were leaving to take a truck to Amsterdam. Since all of the trucks in the area were owned by Nazi soldiers, she had to use that disguise and claim that Peter had been orphaned by friendly fire and she was with the Red Cross, escorting him to an orphanage in Amsterdam. The plan somehow worked, and the two made it to the city of Amsterdam while surrounded by troops that would’ve killed them on site had they known Peter and his mother were Jewish.

Peter’s story was fascinating and terrifying. He endured so much at such a young age, and the fact that he’s still alive to tell the story is a monumental feat considering how easily he could have been killed. It was incredibly brave of him to tell us about all of this when it must have been so scary for him.

You can read more about his story on the Holocaust Center for Humanity's site: https://www.holocaustcenterseattle.org/peter-metzelaar

There's a one hour interview with him on YouTube: <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XMDHF--8Oyw" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Coincidentally, within an hour of watching the presentation, this headline popped up in my Facebook: Nearly two-thirds of US young adults unaware 6ma(illion) Jews killed in the Holocaust

The first three paragraphs of the article are shocking. 

Almost two-thirds of young American adults do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believe Jews caused the Holocaust, a new survey has found, revealing shocking levels of ignorance about the greatest crime of the 20th century.

According to the study of millennial and Gen Z adults aged between 18 and 39, almost half (48%) could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto established during the second world war.

Almost a quarter of respondents (23%) said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, or had been exaggerated, or they weren’t sure. One in eight (12%) said they had definitely not heard, or didn’t think they had heard, about the Holocaust.

What's equally shocking is Sunday morning waking up to headlines that the current President of the United States was at a campaign rally in Minnesota on Saturday, and there, to an almost entirely white audience, he  trumpeted a popular eugenics theory. “You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don't you believe? The racehorse theory," he declared. 

It strikes me that words like that coming from a cult-of-personality figurehead are exactly how the Holocaust was allowed to happen.