Steelykid!
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 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 5, 2015I feel a little bad that I'm doing two photo-of-the-day posts in a row that are just pictures of SteelyKid, but my day today was dominated by a taekwondo tournament down in Duanesburg, SteelyKid's first actual competition. And she got second place:
SteelyKid with her silver medal from today's taekwondo tournament.
This is somewhat less impressive than you might think, because she was in a division of three. She actually lost her one bout fairly badly, but did slightly better than the third girl in the field, thus getting the silver medal. But again, it was her first time competing, and on…
drorzel | December 5, 2015Both SteelyKid's elementary school and her after-school day care had "book fairs" this week. These include a bunch of display cases full of books at various reading levels, and also a couple of tables of plastic toy crap. One of the marginally less crappy plastic toys was a marker with ink that fluoresces in UV light but is otherwise inevitable, and SteelyKid kept bugging me to get one of those. I eventually caved, because it required only loaning her one dollar to supplement her allowance, and it was worth a buck to me not to have to listen to the complaints that would've ensued otherwise.…
drorzel | November 30, 2015Not an incredibly artistic or innovative bit of photography, here, but I spent a good chunk of the day taking The Pip for his annual physical, so the only pictures I took were of SteelyKid's schoolwork:
SteelyKid's second-grade assignment to imagine and illustrate a conversation with a turkey.
This assignment asked her to draw herself asking a question that a turkey would then answer, and then the turkey asking her one in return. Her writing is more enthusiastic than accurate as far as spelling is concerned, but she has a good imagination. In case you can't make it out (spelling corrected…
drorzel | November 30, 2015We had our usual tv time on Sunday morning at my parents', with the kids alternating picking what they watched. When it came around to SteelyKid's turn, she opted for MythBusters, which wasn't available on demand, but she has several episodes on her tablet. Of course, if SteelyKid was going to watch video on her tablet, then The Pip had to watch video on his, which led to this shot:
SteelyKid and The Pip watching video on their tablets.
And also blissful, blessed quiet, a gigantic improvement over the sounds of "Paw Patrol," which was The Pip's cartoon of choice on this trip. And, well,…
drorzel | November 27, 2015So, today, we engaged in the traditional Black Friday activity of, um, going to the park and chasing birds:
SteelyKid and The Pip scaring geese with their swords at the park on the day after Thanksgiving.
It was an unbelievably warm day for late November-- if you look closely, you can see that SteelyKid is wearing shorts and a T-shirt-- so we couldn't very well sit inside. So we went across to the other side of Whitney Point Lake to Dorchester Park to let the kids run around. We hiked up the stream, played on the playground, and chased the big flocks of Canada geese into the lake.
This did…
drorzel | November 25, 2015We're visiting my parents for Thanksgiving, and one of the highliughts of any trip to visit Grandma and Grandpa is that they have Nerf swords for the kids:
SteelyKid and The Pip in their traditional Nerf sword battle.
This raged for a good while before dinner. Hopefully, they'll sleep well tonight...
drorzel | November 22, 2015I try not to have this be the cute-kid-photo-of-the-day, but really, how could I not use this shot:
SteelyKid and The Pip discussing the finer points of Lego superhero stickers.
The Pip was not a huge fan of the antibiotics that came with his strep-throat diagnosis, so we bought a sticker book as a bribe reward for taking his medicine. Yesterday afternoon, in one of the brief quiet periods of a busy day, SteelyKid sat down with him and they had an intense conversation about the identities and powers of the various heroes and villains represented in the sticker pages.
Which is too cute not…
drorzel | November 12, 2015Another day with a staged-for-talk-prep photo:
My desk, with social media on both computers.
I needed a picture of social-media apps on computer screens for an upcoming talk, so I took one. After first tweeting a cute-kid photo:
Cute-kid photo because I want to take a picture of Twitter to use in a talk. pic.twitter.com/QIYHTda0vL
— Chad Orzel (@orzelc) November 12, 2015
Yeah, it's shameless. But look at them, they're adorable! And the reminder of their adorableness was really needed today, because it's been an incredibly frustrating week, kid-wise.
I should note that I do not actually…
drorzel | November 10, 2015Another delayed photo-of-the-day, because SteelyKid was sent home with strep throat yesterday. She complained that her throat hurt any time we asked her to eat anything other than ice cream, but other than that was basically unaffected. Which is sort of the most irritating sick-kid scenario possible, because if she were actually sick and listless, I could just put the tv on and let her doze on the couch while I worked. But instead, she was up and playing more or less as usual, skipping over to my computer regularly to interrupt me.
We had some fun-- watched Shaolin Soccer on DVD, and some of…
drorzel | October 31, 2015I took some shots of nature stuff on this morning's dog walk, and a few good action shots at the last soccer game of the season. But honestly, the only thing anybody wants to see today is Halloween costumes, so here are the kids:
The Pip as Batman, SteelyKid as a ninja.
Cleverly, they both selected costumes that are predominantly black; we augmented these with glow-stick bracelets and flashlights while actually trick-or-treating, for improved visibility.
Putting these together required a good deal more GIMP work than I anticipated, because the raw shots for the two are at slightly…
drorzel | October 26, 2015SteelyKid's second-grade class is doing a "Zoom Time" thing where the kids make short presentations to the class about one of their interests. It's basically an expanded show-and-tell, with fifteen minutes for talking, and five for "questions and compliments."
She, of course, decided to talk about taekwondo, so I brought her sparring gear in and she suited up:
SteelyKid in sparring gear for her "Zoom Time" presentation. Daddy included for scale.
The highlight of the presentation was when she let the whole class come up and take turns punching her in the chest to demonstrate the…
drorzel | October 18, 2015Every Sunday, I take the kids down to the Schenectady Greenmarket, which from May-October is held outdoors, on the streets around City Hall. This puts it right next to our local independent bookstore, The Open Door, which is kind of popular with the kids:
SteelyKid and The Pip running into our local independent bookstore.
We have a standing agreement that they can each get one book every week, and SteelyKid can use her allowance to buy a toy if she chooses. We're amassing quite the collection of picture books, and The Pip will buy absolutely anything with superhero branding-- this week, he…
drorzel | October 11, 2015Rhett is off at some sort of football game, but don't worry, I'll step up to make sure the Internet has pictures of kids playing soccer:
SteelyKid in action at rec soccer.
I'm assistant coaching the team (and the only coach for every other game), which makes it hard to get photos of SteelyKid, but I brought the camera to yesterday's game, and managed a few good shots. I try to avoid posting photos of other people's kids on the Internet, though, and this being second-grade soccer, it's not easy to get any photos near the ball where the frame isn't kind of crowded. So this cropped shot of…
drorzel | September 27, 2015Really, was there any question at all what the subject of today's photo would be? I mean, I'm a geek, I have a fancy camera-- of course I was taking pictures of the lunar eclipse. But more importantly, I was sharing it with SteelyKid:
SteelyKid looking at the eclipse through her telescope.
That's SteelyKid looking through her telescope at the early stages of the eclipse. The light is from the lamp in our front yard, which would be no good at all for trying to see anything actually faint, but isn't really an issue when you're looking at the full moon.
The telescope-- a Celestron FirstScope…
drorzel | September 19, 2015Weekends around here tend to be ridiculously busy, so you get a cell-phone photo again. But with a twist-- over in Twitter-land, Frank Noschese mentioned a smartphone app called Motion Shot that takes short video clips and processes them to provide multiple images of some moving object. This is, of course, basically irresistible for a physicist.
SteelyKid was invited to a classmate's birthday party today, held at a trampoline park, and I shot some video of SteelyKid bouncing around. Which Motion Shot turned into this image:
Multiple images of SteelyKid bouncing at the trampoline park.…
drorzel | September 17, 2015SteelyKid's elementary school had their annual open house tonight, and they tried something different with it this year. Rather than having prepared presentations in the classrooms, they had the kids lead a "tour" for their parents-- she got a map and a "bingo" card, and then led us to her classroom, the cafeteria, the library, and various other spots to say hi to the various teachers. It was very cute, though maybe not all that informative.
Her second-grade class did a thing where each kid colored an owl and wrote three clues on it. The whole collection of owls were left out on a table, and…
drorzel | September 13, 2015Elite Northeastern private college tuition and fees (1989-1993): ~$80,000
Gold class ring from elite Northeastern private college: ~$500
Colorful Rainbow Loom bracelet from your seven-year-old daughter: Priceless.
My right hand.
SteelyKid made this bracelet the other day at her after-school day care, while demonstrating to her friends that she could knit the rubber bands together with her fingers. She "got a little carried away," and as a result it's too big for her. "But it fit one of the grown-ups, and I said 'Hey, I bet it would fit my dad!' So I want you to have it, Daddy."
So, I have…
drorzel | September 10, 2015I said when I started this that there would inevitably be a few cell-phone snapshots, on days when I'm too busy to get fancy with the DSLR. This was one such, so here's a quick shot of SteelyKid at tonight's Elite Team taekwondo practice, talking to her coach.
SteelyKid, in sparring gear, with her taekwondo coach.
The Elite Team class is all sparring, all the time, and we established today that she's the youngest kid who goes to those classes. By about two months. Of course, the gap between second- and third-youngest is two years... (The second-youngest kid is the younger brother of one of…