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drorzel | April 17, 2016As promised in the last catch-up post, a set of pictures less devoted to cute-kid shots.
213/366: Zone Defense
The superhero-themed "zones" of our house, as defined by the Pip.
The Pip has been making one of his preschool teachers draw superheroes for him. At some point, he cut these out with scissors (or possibly made Kate cut them out), and hung them up in different rooms. So the living room is now the Captain America Zone, the kitchen is the Flash Zone, and the library is the Spider-Man Zone. I'm not sure what exactly that means, but it's a thing.
214/366: Red In Tooth And Claw
A hawk…
drorzel | April 14, 2016A bunch of stuff happened that knocked me out of the habit of editing and posting photos-- computer issues, travel, catching up on work missed because of travel, and a couple of bouts with a stomach bug the kids brought home. I have been taking pictures, though, and will make an attempt to catch up. Given the huge delay, though, I'm going to drop the pretense of doing one photo a day, and do the right number, but grouped more thematically.
This span included Easter, which meant a lot of family time, which means photos of the kids doing stuff. So here's a big group of those.
The Sillyheads…
drorzel | March 10, 2016I seem to have fallen into a thing where I take pictures more frequently than I edit and post them. I blame the kids-- SteelyKid got sick on Sunday (her third bout with strep in the last five months), and The Pip has decided to get a jump on Daylight Savings by waking up an hour early every day this week. Those both wiped out a lot of time I otherwise would've used for photo processing and blogging.
Anyway, this past Saturday was the big Odyssey of the Mind tournament for SteelyKid and her team. I obviously have a bunch of photos of this; just as obviously they mostly include other people's…
drorzel | March 6, 2016Thursday was a travel day, the less said about which the better. So, while I do have a couple of cell-phone snaps from the day, I'm just going to ignore it, and give you two better photos from Friday and Saturday. These go nicely together, as you can see in the composite that's the "featured image" for this post.
182/366: Dunking Dude:
The Pip hanging on the rim at the Girl Scout carnival.
Friday night, the local Girl Scouts had a "nickel carnival" as a fundraiser for... something or another. SteelyKid is a scout, and Kate's helping lead her Brownie troop, so they had to go, and I brought…
drorzel | March 6, 2016There's a sort of Internet tradition of posting photos of hotel-room views when traveling, so here's a very slightly artsy version of same:
View from my hotel room in Urbana, IL.
The first time I looked out the window, there was a big-ass truck parked directly in front of it. I like this version a little better, though.
Kidding about the accommodations aside, I had a good time visiting the University of Illinois, and my talk there went very well. The travel to and from Champaign was less than enjoyable, but such is the airline industry in the modern US...
drorzel | March 2, 2016I spent Tuesday flying to Champaign, Illinois, which was probably a big mistake. I should've booked a Southwest flight to Midway Airport in Chicago, and rented a car to drive down to Champaign, but I decided that might be annoying on the way home, so opted to fly the whole way. Which meant a United flight into O'Hare, followed by an American flight to Champaign, both in aircraft that felt like scale models of actual jetliners.
And, of course, there was this:
Snow removal trucks on the runway at O'Hare International Airport.
That's from the plane as we taxied to the gate in Chicago, in a…
drorzel | February 28, 2016I've included at least two photos of the Nott Memorial in this series, so I'm a little hesitant to do another. But here's an angle on it that doesn't show up as much:
SteelyKid and The Pip looking down from the third floor railing inside the Nott Memorial,
We went over to campus yesterday looking for a bigger open space in which to fly SteelyKid's RC helicopter, which turned into something of a quixotic quest-- most of the big open spaces I had access to had students in them studying. But this did get us inside the Nott, where the kids enjoyed the view from the third floor down into the…
drorzel | February 25, 2016As I've mentioned a few times, SteelyKid is part of an Odyssey of the Mind team through her school, working on a problem to build a structure from balsa wood and glue that will hold as much weight as possible. They've been hard at work the last several weeks, and completed a test structure last night, shown here just prior to testing:
SteelyKid's OM team's balsa wood structure, ready for testing.
This ended up supporting about 53 pounds before it collapsed, which means it could've held up at least one of the team members. Not too shabby. The kids were very fired up for the crushing process…
drorzel | February 24, 2016The Pip is in pre-school these days, and we have a running joke when I drop him off where I tell him to work hard, and he responds "No, grown-ups do work. You go to work. I'm going to the JCC to play with my friends!"
Of course, his playing does involve a bit of work, in that they do a lot of arts and crafts stuff. And while there was a long period where he wasn't really into drawing on paper, in recent weeks, he's gotten very fired up about drawing, and every day we get a few scibbled-on sheets of paper sent home. Put this together with the steady flow of homework from SteelyKid, and the kid…
drorzel | February 23, 2016I feel a little bad sometimes that I don't really give the Pip his due on the blog. Back when SteelyKid was a toddler and pre-schooler, I had a lot more free time in which to transcribe the various conversations I had with her into super-cute blog posts. The Pip is in the same sort of stage now, and tells some amazing stories, but I have much less time, and by the time I do get free to get to the computer, I usually forget about it.
However, while cleaning up and photographing the Giant Shelf of Kid Art, I ran across a book that he made with... One of his preschool teachers, I guess, because…
drorzel | February 22, 2016Another long photo-a-day gap, because the last week was crazy in a bunch of ways. The weather has slewed wildly between winter and spring; Kate had to go to The City to argue a case leaving me solo-parenting the sillyheads; and I've been fighting the onset of a rotten cold. That last has involved a bunch of frantic work in anticipation of not being able to do much for a couple of days at some point, and today that caught up to me and I decided it was an official recovery day. Which gave me time to sort and GIMP the various pictures I took.
167/366: Brief Winter
We got a bit of an ice storm…
drorzel | February 19, 2016One of the evergreen topics for academic magazines like Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education is faculty "mentoring." It's rare for a week to go by without at least one lengthy essay on the topic, many of which recirculate multiple times through my various social media channels. The latest batch of these (no links, because this isn't about the specific articles in question) prompted me to comment over in Twitter-land that:
Articles about "mentoring" of faculty are great for reminding me of all the ways I'm atypical for an academic personality-wise.
— Chad Orzel (@orzelc)…
drorzel | February 15, 2016This weekend's photos were mostly of the kids, and mostly had other people's kids in them, as they did a double play-date on Saturday afternoon. I'm going to lump two days together, because they're really just repeating previous themes. Here are the kids eating dinner at the Union women's basketball game Friday night:
SteelyKid and The Pip eating dinner at a basketball game.
(They went absolutely bonkers after this-- it's hard to describe how hyped up they were Friday.)
And here's yet another fort:
SteelyKid watching tv from inside the tunnel fort she built on the couch.
This one was…
drorzel | February 10, 2016I did bring my good camera with me to Newport News, and took it on the tour of Jefferson Lab yesterday, but despite the existence of DSLR pics, you're getting a cell-phone snap for the photo of the day:
That's the audience about 10-15 minutes before my talk last night, so it was a good turnout. And they laughed in the right places, and asked some really good questions last night. I also got asked to appear in a selfie with a bunch of students from a local school, so they could prove they were there to get extra credit for their science class...
The talk went well, though we had some…
drorzel | February 9, 2016I'm in Newport News, VA, to give a talk tonight at Jefferson Lab, and they're putting me up at the on-site Residence Facility. The rooms at this are apparently sponsored associated with institutions that use the facility, with big signs on all the doors. Here's mine:
Door to my room at JLab's Residence Facility.
So, I guess my stay is in some sense subsidized by the University of Manitoba. It's a perfectly adequate hotel room, so, thanks, Manitoba.
As I am a Sooper Geeenyus, I forgot to pack the dress pants I usually wear when giving talks. Sigh. Happily, this is a public lecture, so jeans…
drorzel | February 8, 2016Since our recent trip to Vermont, SteelyKid has been obsessed with building blanket forts. These have mostly been in the living room, leading to a bit of angst at the end of the day when we need the blankets back. So i did a little reorganizing in the basement, and dug some sheets out of storage, allowing the construction of a longer-duration fort.
The blanket fort du jour in the basement of Chateau Steelypips.
This covers the basement comprehensively enough that it's probably a little hard to appreciate how much stuff is inside. The critical thing, though, is that SteelyKid is satisfied…
drorzel | February 8, 2016I've been remiss in my self-promotional duties, but I'm giving a public lecture tomorrow night in Newport News, VA, as part of the Jefferson Lab Science Series. This will be my traditional "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk, with the sad addition of a slide honoring the late, great Queen of Niskayuna (visible as the "featured image" with this post). This isn't the first dog-physics talk I've given since her death in December, but the previous one was the relativity talk, which has less Emmy-specific content. This one includes one of the video clips I made around a dog…
drorzel | February 7, 2016We spent most of Saturday at a taekwondo tournament-- the AAU Adirondack Championship, or some permutation of those words. This was held in the gym over at Hudson Valley Community College, and was fairly big:
The taekwondo tournmanet from way up in the bleachers.
It was, however, 99% waiting around. They did black-belt sparring in the morning, and said that staging for the colored belts would be at 1pm, so we were there at noon. But they did the forms competition before the Olymopic sparring (SteelyKid's event), so it was 3:45 before they called her group to be sorted into age and weight…
drorzel | February 7, 2016A few days ago, The Pip came home with a "present" for me and Kate, wrapped up in construction paper. This turned out to be another sheet of paper, which is actually a launch control panel:
The Pip's rocket control panel. (One of his teachers wrote the words for him...)
The layout of the "buttons" is all him, but he got one of his teachers to do the labels. On the other side, it says "The missle will launch in one minute," which I assume he also dictated.
He's got a rich inner life...
drorzel | January 31, 2016I've been neglecting the photo-a-day thing for the last week-and-a-bit, but for a good reason: I had a deadline of, well, today, to finish a chapter I was asked to contribute to an academic book. And while I fully realize that actually hitting that deadline is not typical academic behavior, I have A Thing about that, and was going to make damn sure I finished by the end of the month, as I had promised. So a lot of stuff got neglected, to the point where there were a few days in that stretch where I didn't take any pictures at all.
So, you get another catch-up post. I owe nine photos, but I…