Chasing a Dragon

D&D DISPLAY: On Wednesday, we made a last minute, super quick trip to the Renton Historical Museum. It was our first visit there. We'd been meaning to go all summer to see their exhibit "Hero's Feast," about the game Dungeons & Dragons. We went on the day it closed. And had to fit it into about a 25-minute window.

While the game Dungeons & Dragons is a world-wide phenomenon, it has a special link to Renton. Wizards of the Coast is the company who create the game, and they were founded in Renton.

I am not going to spend a lot of time here typing about our visit. Instead, the photos will do most of the talking. I took a bunch, because Christian wasn't able to accompany us, and I knew he'd be interested to see what it was all about. 

 They had a D&D game set up. It looked like our dining room table does from time to time. 

 This vantage point gives the dungeon master's view. 

They had some artifacts from the early days of D&D on display.

This D&D set up is a little more elaborate than most gamers'.

D&D is definitely a cooperative, collaborative effort. I think that's one of the reasons it's so popular.

Unfortunately, due to things that had really nothing to do with the game, D&D has been viewed with an unfairly suspicious eye by many. 

Once upon a time, D&D was definitely thought of as a guys-only endeavor. That's definitely not the case any more.

Today's Annabelle's birthday and (don't tell her), one of her gifts is a 3-session art and writing class with one of the women mentioned on the poster below.

The exhibit featured a magnetic board where people could place characters, items and such.

 Annabelle was drawn to a table where visitors could draw their own D&D character.

 Here's a collection of others' drawings.

 And here's a close up of Annabelle's.

The exhibit wasn't large, and it wasn't spectacular, but it was a nice overview of the game, its history, and its appeal. I'm glad we went.

SHAKE DOWN: On Thursday's to do list was talking about earthquakes. Worldwide, October 17 is Great ShakeOut day, where earthquake preparedness is taught. 

I shared this graphic with the kids. We talked about where we'd stand in our house if an earthquake hit. When we were at the grocery store, we looked around and talked about where would be safer zones. 

MOMENTOUS WALK: Friday morning, we watched some history being made. We tuned in to watch NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir perform the first all-women space walk. 

One of their tasks was replacing a power controller on the International Space Station's exterior. 

This will be Koch’s fourth spacewalk and Meir’s first. The two women are close friends. What a cool experience for them, and it's a milestone long overdue, IMHO.

Monday Sun Day

OUTDOOR SCHOOL: Monday it was so lovely out that I ordered the kids outside while they were studying up on some Japanese. 

I think it's good to mix things up when studying instead of just sitting in front of a computer at a in a dark-ish room.

PRODUCTION LINE: Annabelle (also known as Miss Bee) has been plugging on labels for our honey jars.

 I like her design!

CONDITIONAL: This week's psychology curriculum is focusing on behavioral psychology. This includes classical conditionaing, which is learning that one stimulus signals the arrival of another stimulus. (Think of Pavlov's dog salivating at the sound of a bell. It learned that response after having a bell run before feeding. Soon, the dog would salivate at just the bell, instead of the bell followed by food.)

One of the bits of homework today was watching a low-tech but pretty funny video about classical conditioning. We felt bad for laughing at it, but we did. 


BACK AT IT: With the weekend over, we were back in the gym on Monday. Annabelle gave the climbing wall a go.

Activation

JUMPING IN: So, on Thursday, we joined a gym.

Likely, that congers up images of weight machines and treadmills.

This gym is not that.

It's more like American Ninja Warrior meets a bouncy house.

I had seen a couple of posts before about what I thought was just a trampoline place that had a great program for homeschoolers. Thursday morning, I woke up determined to actually find out who and what that was. Turns out the place is called DEFY, and lucky for us, there's a nearly big, brand new one just a couple of miles from home.

I saw that their homeschool deal was just $10 a month per student for visits any time between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., Monday through Friday, September through the end of May. Even though we hadn't even seen the facility yet, I went ahead and took the plunge, figuring even if we went just once a month, it would be worthwhile.

Thursday afternoon we visited the place for the first time and were absolutely blown away by it. It's cavernous, clean, well-maintained, with cool graphics, fun music and attentive employees. And there were only like a dozen other kids there when we dropped by at around 1.

We spent about 90 minutes there the first visit, with the kids exploring the space's various features.

There are balance challenges ...

and things to swing from.

There are LOTS of trampolines of varying shapes and sizes and springiness.

There are obstacles to conquer.

And there are opportunities for a little friendly combat.

I might have been the first mother ever telling her kids to hit each other harder. ;)

The first day we went, the kids practically had the place to themselves.

Friday midday we stopped by again. Totally different scene - apparently it was a teacher workshop day and school was out and so there were around a bazillion kids of all ages there. Annabelle initially wanted to turn around and leave, but CJ wanted to stay, so stay we did. Turns out even with the huge numbers of people there, there was enough to keep the kids busy. I had to basically order a very sweaty CJ out of the place after 45 minutes, because we had things to do.

I definitely feel like the place is $10 (per person) per month well spent!

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."