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drorzel | January 21, 2016Over at Scientific American, Amanda Baker has a story about what scientists say they would tell their younger selves.
I reached out to eight of my colleagues who are currently in STEM fields and asked them a series of questions about their childhood interests in science, school experiences, and roadblocks that they faced on their path from elementary school to their current positions. [...]
Their feedback covered not only what drew them to science, but also what had almost pushed them away. Below I have consolidated the feedback into five main points, including the advice they would give…
drorzel | January 21, 2016As mentioned last week, SteelyKid is doing Odyssey of the Mind this year, and her team has elected to build a balsa wood structure. The goal for these is to support the maximum possible weight, and the first step of the testing is to put a "crusher board" on top. This is a couple of 18" square sheets of plywood glued together with a hole through the middle for the safety pipe that runs up the center of the structure to keep everything aligned.
Since one part of the team had a test structure ready at the end of the last meeting, I wanted to have something we could use to see if it would hold…
drorzel | January 21, 2016When I arrived to pick SteelyKid up the other night, she and her friends were light-saber fighting with long balloons, which is fairly typical of that bunch. While I gathered her stuff up, though, she stopped and twisted her balloon into an animal shape:
SteelyKid's balloon dog, and The Pip's clay volcano.
She got a "How to Make Balloon Animals" kit a few years ago, but she doesn't often do anything with it. So I was pretty impressed that she did this completely from memory. (Of course, I'm easily impressed when it comes to my own kids doing stuff...)
The balloon dog (we'll call it a dog…
drorzel | January 19, 2016This past weekend, Kate went to Arisia, and in order to get a change of scenery and a bit of adult backup, I took the kids up to visit friends in northern Vermont. They have two boys, the younger of whom is just a few months older than SteelyKid, and I was pretty sure the kids would hit it off. I turned out to be right about that, as SteelyKid and C. spent hours engrossed in the construction of an elaborate pillow fort:
SteelyKid is really happy to be making a pillow fort.
This is a very early stage of the construction, from Friday night. They continued working on it all weekend, and at…
drorzel | January 15, 2016SteelyKid is in second grade, and The Pip goes to full-day day care at the JCC, so we get a LOT of kid work sent home-- various homework assignments and class worksheets for her, and assorted art for him. A lot of the art is just a few random crayon scribbles on paper, but some of it's pretty good. Like this robot that came home the other day:
The Pip's construction-paper robot.
(The shiny thing at the bottom is one of the cut-glass "jewels" that Kate got for the kids at the Corning Museum of Glass...)
Huge piles of this stuff build up, and every couple of months I'll go through and…
drorzel | January 14, 2016Back in the fall, a note came home with SteelyKid about an organizational meeting for an Odyssey of the Mind team for her elementary school. My father coached this for several years back in the 80's, and one of my sister's teams went to the World championships (held in Cole Field House at the University of Maryland, of all places, which put an odd spin on going there for basketball games when I was in grad school....), and of course, I'm all in favor of creative problem-solving. So we went, and I ended up as one of the coaches of the team.
The kids, to the surprise of the other coaches, voted…
drorzel | January 14, 2016This one's a bit of a cheat, but the only pictures I got Tuesday that turned out well had other people's kids in them, and I won't post those. So here, instead, is a picture from over the weekend, mostly because I want to tell the cute-kid story that goes with it.
On Sundays, I take the kids to the Schenectady Greenmarket, then to lunch at Panera, then to the grocery store, which gets our various errands taken care of and gives Kate a little quiet time. Depending on how they behave, I sometimes require a bit of quiet time of my own after this, and this past Sunday was One of Those Days. So, I…
drorzel | January 10, 2016I try not to have this be Cute Kid Photo of the Day, but really, when these are the subjects, how can I avoid it?
SteelyKid blowing a bubble toward The Pip, at MiSci.
This is from yesterday's morning excursion to MiSci, where they have added a soap bubble area. This, of course, led to the kids battling with each other by blowing huge bubbles across the table and each popping the other's bubbles. Here's the early stage of a bubble offensive by SteelyKid, shortly to be popped by The Pip.
Another highlight of the visit was the "put yourself inside a bubble" thing, which is a perennial…
drorzel | January 8, 2016It seems appropriate to use a power-of-two day for a new digital device, so here's a photo of my new phone:
My new phone on the wireless charger.
Getting and setting this up took up much of yesterday. It's a Droid Turbo, which is basically the Verizon-branded version of the 2015 equivalent of the Moto X I had previously. Yes, I know, Verizon is kind of unpleasant, but I do just enough travel that the better coverage they offer matters to me. And one of the regularly-cited grievances against them, that they don't push out Android OS updates as often as other carriers, actually verges on a…
drorzel | January 4, 2016One of our Christmas presents for the kids was a slackline kit, which they wanted set up pretty much the instant I got home. So I put it up over the weekend, and on consecutive days got these pictures:
The slackline strung between two trees in the back yard.
SteelyKid's feet bouncing above the slackline.
(I of course also have a bunch of photos where you can see the kids' entire bodies, but for the umpteenth time, I'm trying not to have this be the Cute Kid Photo of the Day...)
Those two seem like they go together, and that catches us up through Sunday. I will try to get back to regular…
drorzel | January 3, 2016After the trip to my parents' for Christmas, I flew down to Charleston, SC to attend the Renaissance Weekend (though none of it fell on an actual weekend day...). This provided some much-needed stress relief, but was not great in photo-a-day terms, as it's a strictly off the record event, so I couldn't exactly photograph sessions I was in or anything like that. But it does provide another nice set of breakpoints to define a collection of catching-up photos, including one bonus shot to make up for the missing day in the previous set.
117/366:
The traditional thing to do when on the road is to…
drorzel | January 3, 2016I'm back after the traditional family holiday and a less traditional trip to Charleston, SC for the Renaissance Weekend meeting. Which means things will start to return to what passes for normal around here, and that means it's time to get caught up on photo-a-day pictures...
What with one thing and another, there was one day in December when I didn't take a single picture, not even a crappy cell-phone snapshot. Not sure how that happened. I'll fill it in at some point with an extra from a day when I got multiple good images, but this catch-up post will be one short of the actual calendar…
drorzel | December 25, 2015Normally, I save a .jpg of our holiday card and post it here. This year, I forgot, but fortunately my parents have one, so you get a photo of a photo card:
The Chateau Steelypips photo card, 2015.
Merry Christmas if you celebrate it, have a lovely Friday otherwise.
drorzel | December 23, 2015It's been a couple of weeks since my last photo-a-day post, for a variety of reasons. First we were in Florida, then Emmy died, then I had some disk space issues that kept me from getting photos off my camera. That's all sorted at last, just in time for me to leave town again...
In an effort to catch up a bit, I'm going to dump several photos at a time into a couple of posts. This one will be a total of eight days' worth of pictures, covering our trip and a few days after. I've got several gigabytes of trip pictures, but almost all of those include the kids, and again, I'm trying not to have…
drorzel | December 19, 2015SteelyKid's second-grade teacher sent home a couple of books about kids dealing with the loss of beloved pets-- one of which, The Tenth Good Thing About Barney is surprisingly atheistic. We read them at bedtime the other night, which was a little rough.
After we finished, and moved her to her bed (when it's my turn to read to her, we do it in the master bedroom, because her bed is really uncomfortable for me), she said, sadly and quietly, "I miss Emmy."
"I do, too, honey," I said, in a less than perfectly steady voice. "She was the best."
That got a smile, and she said "I remember you saying…
drorzel | December 15, 2015We lost the Queen of Niskayuna tonight. Emmy had been having some health issues for a while, and while we were in Florida this past weekend she wasn't eating for the pet-sitter. We tried yet another new version of the new diet food today, with only limited success. And this afternoon, she fell going up the stairs, then again on the deck.
Our regular vet was near closing time, so they recommended going to a different veterinary hospital in the area, where they could do x-rays and ultrasounds as needed. And those revealed a large mass in her abdomen, from tumors in her liver and gall bladder.…
drorzel | December 9, 2015As noted a couple of days ago, this was a big martial arts week at Chateau Steelypips, with The Pip's first-ever belt test on Monday, and SteelyKid testing for her brown belt tonight. Unfortunately, tonight was also a first, namely the first belt test she's failed.
This was, sadly, entirely predictable, as her teacher has really tightened the requirements for tests of late, and said a while back that they would be required to do not only the form for the belt they were testing for, but the previous belt, as well. And I've been trying for three days to get her to run through the red-belt form…
drorzel | December 9, 2015When we had our vetinary adventure back on Saturday, they drew blood for some tests. These showed that Emmy's kidney function is somewhat impaired, leading to yet more tests, and as of last night an extensive regimen of new stuff:
Emmy's new medication.
That's some new kidney-friendly food (in both dry and canned varieties), a drug for her kidneys, an antibiotic in case she has a bladder infection (something she's been prone to; those test results are yet to come back), and a bunch of different vitamins. This on top of the antacid pills we were told to start giving her a couple days ago.…
drorzel | December 7, 2015It's a big week in Chateau Steelypips for martial arts and cute-kid photos. On the heels of SteelyKid's first competition this past weekend, we have the Pip's first belt test tonight (and SteelyKid is testing for her brown belt Wednesday, so you should probably expect one more kid-martial-arts photo before all's said and done...).
Tonight's test was for the "Little Dragons" class for 3-4-5-year olds, and was kind of hilarious. There was a lot of enthusiasm, but also a good deal of fuzziness on the difference between "right" and "left," and their interpretation of push-ups was simply…
drorzel | December 6, 2015SteelyKid's taekwondo competition was the most time-consuming event of yesterday, but not the most stressful. Before we went down to Duanesburg for the tournament, Emmy gave us a bit of a scare.
Emmy is not by any stretch a young dog-- she was a year old when we got her in 2003, so she's 13-- but she's pretty spry. Over the last few weeks, though, she slowed down very dramatically. Initially, I didn't think much of it-- she was unenthusiastic about eating her kibble, but that happens a lot when we get near the end of a bag, and she kept eating treats. And she was moving slowly and stiffly on…