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11-1-2010 ~ Blog #352 ~ David.
We survived two weekends of Halloween parties. Joan decorated the heck out of the house and made a boatload of awesome food and cool games for the parties. Annika was a witch, Svea made a dryad tree spirit costume and I made an owl suit for Brigitta.
I took less photos at this party and focused more on videos. Here is a ridiculously large (730 MB) high def, 9 minute movie from the party. Afterwards we played with dry ice and Svea, Brigitta and Annika made big CO2 soap bubbles. This one is 25 minutes long and is over two gigabytes in size. It's mostly the girls being silly, so I only recommend it if you are a big fan with broadband or it's 2040 and you are my grandchildren wanting to see what your mother and your aunts were like as children; it should download in about two seconds by then.
A few pictures of the house. Below is the "laboratory table" in the basement. This shows it in all of its low-light glory.
We put ball pit balls in the small Air Jumper that we have. The garage became a game room this year.
One of the games was a Cauldron Toss where you tossed Alka Seltzers into small glasses of colored vinegar.
For a craft the kids made skeleton soap bars.
Dry ice bubbles are always fun.
Making a desert and hunting for the ingredients.
When the guests had gone, the girls got to play with the end of the dry ice.
Grandma and Grandpa Hall's three week visit turned into a two month stay due to my father nearly dying from a kidney and gall bladder infection. Dad spent five weeks in the hospital and has a good prognosis. He's still on dialysis and needs to regain some strength, but his recovery has been remarkable and he stands a real chance of coming off dialysis. I picked Dad up at the hospital Saturday morning, took him home for a visit with the family and then took both of my parents to the Cleveland airport for their afternoon flight. Their travels went well. Grandpa received dialysis in Wasilla on Monday and they are due to pick up their dog Saydee today.
Thursday was cold; we didn't trick or treat very long and there wasn't much objection to heading home after a lap around the block.
These two guys were a bit old for trick-or-treaters but they had awesome homemade costumes and I was impressed by Aladdin's bare feet and exposed skin on such a cold trick-or-treat night. They joined a group of trick-or-treaters who sang happy birthday to Papa as he passed out candy on his 91st birthday.
Papa not only survived another year, but he thrived for another year.
Papa at 91, Annika at 5, going on 91.
On Wednesday we attended Kindergruppe Halloween at the German Family Society. It was fun. The kids were cute. We ate food. Nuff said.
Brigitta's Owl costume in the making.
Inside this awesome garage sale trunk were the take home treat bags. The trunk was locked with three skeleton key locks on which Joan added polymer clay decorations. The party guest had to solve riddles to find the keys.
We found that a fluorescent light bulb will light when held close to one of those fun plasma lightning balls.
Host witch hands out squishy eyeballs.
Solving the riddle of the runes.
The grandmas "waiting it out" in the porch.
Kindergarten get a picture clue.
They find their key to the locked chest.
Opening up the treasure chest o' treat bags.
The oldest girls were the last to find their key.
Playing Svea's now famous Embarrassing Game.
Physics Challenge Club Bridges My newest club at IHM is Physics Challenge Club. Students in this club are given a series of typical high school physics class projects. We don't go over the advanced math and formulas but they get to explore concepts, principles and test ideas. Students could work either by themselves, with a fellow student or with a parent. All twenty-some students in grades five through eight seemed to enjoy the project. Some parent and grandparent engineers helped with designs. Students were given 100 chemistry burning splints and could use any kind of glue to build a bridge spanning 24 centimeters and included a roadway for a matchbox car (and several other stipulations). I built a bridge crusher that pressed the bridges into a scale until they broke. Bridges were judged on their own weight to strength ratio. Svea's bridge held 2,228 times its own weight and literally exploded into over twenty pieces when it broke. Here's a two minute 180 MB 720p HD movie of the bridges breaking.
The bridge breaker in my classroom/lab. On the right is a 75 cent garage sale screw jack. The jack allows a load to be added quickly, evenly and smoothly producing relatively maximum/best-case results. The verticals on the left are guides to help ensure that the load travels straight down. The big bolt in the middle-top is a fulcrum for the top bar; you see the left side in the video. I wanted it to be springy so that when the stronger bridges gave out the load would slam down at a rate much higher than normal 1 G acceleration from a gravity mass, producing fun, violent bridge destruction (which it did). The $9 scale goes up to 300#. If we had bridges hit 300# my plan was to put one side of the bridge-spanner base block on the center of the scale and the other on block. We would then multiply the scale reading by two, so a 200# reading would really be 400#. The hinged three part walnut thing that presses on the bridges simulates two scale cars and articulates enough that the bridge upper surface must have some integrity. We ran the machine 16 times in 40 minutes, including messing around with a few bridges that wouldn't fit/stand quite right.
The broken bridges are on display at school.
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10-12-2010 ~ Blog #351 ~ David. This Sunday we hiked The Glens trail at The Gorge.
We celebrated Brigitta's Swedish Name Day last week
The girls with a brother and sister who they met at the park.
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10-3-2010 ~ Blog #350 ~ David.
My father is very ill. Ten days ago Joan and my mother took him to Akron General Hospital. At first it looked like gall stones and a kidney infection. His condition deteriorated day after day and he ended up in the ICU, intubated, sedated, on dialysis. His condition has improved significantly and today he was moved out of the ICU. Dad is most likely over his infection but his kidneys have not yet restarted and this is our big concern at this point.
Yesterday the girls danced at an Oktoberfest in St. Joe's in Suffield/Mogadore. It rained and was cold but they were troopers. I've uploaded two huge HD 720p movies of the Kindergruppe and Junior Youth Group performances to our movie page. These are 700 and 800 MB files so if you want to download them plan on an overnight download.
From 9-24 Svea's Girl Scout Troop hiked about Virginia Kendall after school. Brigitta, Annika and I tromped around a bit since we had to pick Svea up.
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