Eddikashun

The saying is that you're supposed to learn something new every day. I tend to learn nothing new for a handful of days and then fill a basket with new knowledge in one afternoon. Or forenoon as the case may be. I comfort myself on the off days that although I'm not learning anything new, I'm practicing what I learned the last go-around.

Today is a basket-filling sort of day. So far, by 1pm, I've...

...learned how rock is quarried, cut, and shipped. (They pour chemicals down the drilled holes and add water, separating it from the mountain by expansion. Less stress on the rock than using dynamite.)

...learned that onyx is a pale, creamy yellow-ecru color and is about as soft as marble, making it relatively easy to carve. It can also be back-lit for added beauty. ( I always thought onyx was black)

...learned that there's no way I can afford those beautiful counter tops and figurines in the foreseeable future. ($395 for a 24inch vase?!)

...learned that there are so many stone colors and patterns that I can't figure out how a person can decide what to use where in their house if money is not a factor. (Money being a factor I can decide in two seconds...the cheapest!)

...learned that "serpentine" refers to a type of rock as well as a type of soil (I knew about the soil already; the rock part is new. Let's see...serpentine rock is basalt that took on different elements within its crystalline structure as it was forming underwater. Mine is a beautiful jade color shot through with white quartz.)

...learned what it means to click "no" on "convert line breaks" in the settings/formatting tab of my blog. The effect is as if I've taken one deep breath and ran my entire post together as one paragraph.

The things you learn in Scouts

Last weekend was another adventure in camping with almost a dozen girls ages 9-12. We have a good (excellent, really) parent involvement and there were five adults to ride herd on the girls.


We spent Friday and Saturday nights at a Girl Scout camp located on the coast. Saturday, we got up at 6am (after going to bed at nearly 1am) so we could be up, dressed, breakfasted and at the tide pools 35 minutes up the coast at the ideal time of 9am. One of the rules I've laid down for the girls is that they must be cheerful in the mornings even if it kills them. I tell them if they don't feel cheerful, they've got to fake it. They've not let me down yet.


So we spent about an hour at the tide pools (tons of mussels, barnacles, barnacles on mussels, anemones - some at least a foot long and six inches in diameter, small dead jellyfish, a couple of starfish, and lots of colorful seaweed and algae) and continued up the coast to the aquarium. This is the same aquarium that housed (pooled?) Keiko of "Free Willy". They turned Keiko's pool into an undersea garden passageway where you can walk inside a plexiglass tunnel and look around at the sea creatures swimming beside, above, and below you. Check it out at http://aquarium.org.


We stopped and hiked up to a lighthouse on the way back and looked out over the cliffs to the surf pounding the rocks below and the sea lions body-surfing a short way out.


The girls were pretty worn out by the time we got back to the camp but it didn't stop them from learning and playing old, fun games. I don't know what this first one's called but you measure the distance from your opponent by putting one foot in front of the other with your toe to the opponent's toe of their front foot. Bringing your front foot together with your back foot, put your hands up with elbows bent and try to knock your opponent off-balance by slapping against their hands without losing your own balance. The first person to take a step or fall into the other one loses. For some reason, the girls all wanted to take on the dad who is 6'4" and weighs 240 lbs. One of them actually caught him by surprise and knocked him off-balance. It was quite hilarious to see the girls less than 5 feet tall and weighing no more than 85 pounds match up with him. They usually ended up on their backsides.


The other game they played is called "Slap". Again, you stand facing your opponent with your hands held out in front of you. One of you puts your hands palms-up and the other's is palms-down lightly touching each other. The palms-up person then quickly tries to slap the backs of the hands above. The trick is to be fast enough to slap the other person's hands or quick enough to yank your hands away without getting slapped. The hands return to neutral (palms-up/palms-down) and the slapper tries again. If the slapper misses, they exchange positions and the slapper becomes the slappee.


We finished off the evening with a dance (each girl doing her own thing on a slippery floor and with sock feet) after a candlelight supper of spaghetti, salad, and bread since it was Valentine's Day. What could be more romantic than a candlelight supper with four good friends and eleven "daughters"?

Culinary creations

Cameron loves fresh salsa and has been wanting to make his own for awhile now. I don't particularly like it so hadn't pursued a recipe until he started asking me to find one.

The first thing I did was call my sister-in-law who is an awesome cook and can take random things out of the fridge and come up with some great-tasting stuff. That was not as profitable a call as I'd have liked because like all great cooks, she doesn't measure or jot down. She just takes what's on hand and tosses them together in proportions that "look good". She did, however, give me some good advice. The best advice was to look on the list of ingredients of his favorite salsa and start experimenting.

Yesterday, Cameron, Richelle and I made a trip to the grocery store and looked over the assortment of vegetables. Cameron loves habañeros so we got three of them. He doesn't particularly like jalapeños so we ignored those. There were some little dark green peppers called serranos that looked good so we picked out half a dozen. There were some poblanos that I remembered my sister-in-law mentioning so we got one. I pointed to a tomatillo and asked Cameron if he wanted one.
"What do they taste like?" he asked.
"I have no idea but they look cute!" was my girly answer. He snorted, shook his head and told me to put one in the cart. Well, they are cute - a little green tomato wrapped up in a papery leaf-like thingy.
We added half a dozen roma tomatoes, a yellow bell pepper, an Anaheim pepper, a yellow onion, cilantro, a few limes, fresh basil and took a swing through the chips aisle on our way to the check-out.

He was three hours slicing, dicing, and deciding how to concoct four different combinations of ingredients. Along the way, he decided he wanted to taste the different things that were unfamiliar to him. That's when we learned just how HOT serrano peppers are! He tasted the teeniest mince of one and described the experience as a blast of heat that tapered off to very warm. He also managed to get some oil on his lips in the process and was forced to stop production long enough to wash them with soap. Juice, chips, and bread simply couldn't cut it.

He was impressed with the tomatillo. Crunchy and moist, a hint of citrus with the idea of heat but when the piece was swallowed, so was the illusion.



He was mildly disappointed with the results. None of the four combinations he made were hot enough for him!! They were plenty hot enough for me. But then, I don't like very much heat (I also don't like my sodas very fizzy or very cold [the guys say I like it flat and warm] but that's another story.) We forgot to add garlic, salt, pepper, and sugar until most of it was gone but it did bring out the flavors a little more. He liked the serrano peppers but not the poblano. He wants to swap out the yellow bell pepper and try green onions instead. His favorite mix was the one with everything in it.

I told him that I would supply him with whatever vegetables he wanted however often he wanted it. He looked a bit startled and I explained that I would happily keep him in ingredients if this was the way to get veggies into him.

Lego Robotics

Here's Richelle with the trophy her team won at State Competition January 17th. They also got a participation medal which she's wearing.



As I posted earlier, it's made entirely of Lego pieces except for the written part on the base and the decals on the side.



Here's a close-up of the commendation on the base.

Now she's involved with a Science, Electronics, and Technology 4-H group and having a lot of fun. Part of the meeting, they're working on electricity and the second half they're learning more about the Lego robot; its sensors, attachments, and more advanced programing. Yours truly is in charge of that bit. It's quite a challenge because there's no curriculum I can go by. I'm having to piece a curriculum together out of online resources and tutorials I came home with from training last fall.

What can be done to cats

Nick came over the other day and was telling us that his girlfriend was getting a kitten for her three-year-old daughter. He said it was going to be gay. At our confused looks, he explained.

The kitten (male) is white but Jade (the 3yo) wanted a pink cat. So her grandmother dyed it pink. Jade has named it Cocoa. This cat will be indoors so they're getting it fixed. Jade is handicapped (arthrogryposis) so this cat will also need to be de-clawed.

To sum it up, it's a male white cat, dyed pink, called Cocoa, with no claws and no balls. Yup, it's gay.

Languages

Was ist Los?
What's happening is a great language program. Mighty expensive, but The Rosetta Stone is very effective. Richelle has greater command of German in the few months that we've had the program than she did in the two years she struggled to keep up with Cameron and me. Not that Cameron and I are by any means fluent! A person needs to be a bit more dedicated than we were to achieve fluency.

This program teaches a language through the three learning avenues of seeing, speaking, and doing. Seeing the sentences or phrases as the native speaker says and then choosing one of four pictures that corresponds with what was said; speaking the phrases or sentences into a microphone and trying to match the voice print of the native speaker; and typing the sentences of phrases that are spoken.

My favorite is typing. I'm a visual learner so I can understand a written language far easier than I can understand the spoken language. Hearing something spoken and then typing it in correctly is good for me.

I had to get a microphone for the computer the other day. Richelle's pronunciation was off and she couldn't hear it so she needed to work on the spoken part of the program. She's been having a great time with it.

She has a friend over for the day today and all week she'd been working hard to get ahead one lesson in all subjects to have the day free. Before her friend came, she was at the computer playing with the Rosetta Stone, trying to match the voice prints. She has the day free but saw the program as a fun thing to do. That's the way to learn without realizing you're learning something.

I didn't have to pay the steep price for the program because a kind friend gave us theirs. I've always wanted the program but shied away from the cost. Let us be thankful for generous friends!

FLL State Championships

Richelle's First Lego League team won this Young Team trophy at the Qualifying Tournament and earned a place at the State Competitions.

Her team attended the State Championships Saturday. It was a long and busy day with check-in at 7:30am and the Awards Ceremony concluding at 5:00pm. It was one of those days of intense activity interspersed with short intervals of hurry-up-and-wait. We had the added wrench tossed in of one team member not feeling well. At one point, she went to a quiet room with her mother and rested for awhile.


This is the centerpiece Richelle made out of Legos for their pit table. The black letter fade into the background but it spells "Thunderstorms" - their team name.



The format for State Championships is the same as the Qualifying Tournament. They are judged in the areas of Teamwork, Technical (robot design and programming), and Research Project. They also have three turns at the competition tables to complete as many pre-defined missions as possible within 2.5 minutes (Performance). The top score is saved and the others are discarded.

When all is said and done, there are several categories of awards. Teamwork, Technical, Project, Performance, Young Team, Rookie Team (one trophy), Champion Runners Up, and Champion. FLL believes that what the kids learn is far more important that what they win, so a team earns only one plaque/trophy. They also award a high percentage of teams. There were 60 teams participating and 26 trophies or plaques awarded at each of the two championships for a total of 120 teams and 52 trophies/plaques. The first and second place winners in the Teamwork, Technical, Project, and Performance divisions received a trophy; the third and fourth place teams received a plaque. Trophies were also given for first through third place in Young Team, Champion's Runners Up, and Champions.

Richelle's team came home with.....*drum roll, please*......Second Place in Teamwork! The trophy is made of yellow Lego pieces glued together in the shape of a Loving cup mounted on a base of flat Lego pieces. The only non-Lego pieces of the entire trophy are the stickers on the sides and the engraving on the base. It's traveling to all the girls' homes and my camera was dead at the competition but I have pictures coming. Meanwhile, here's Richelle wearing her participation medal for State Competition.



So that is over with but I'm committed to coaching another team in the fall. This year's experience will be very helpful.