Us in the Redwoods, August 14, 2011: John, Ondine, Roy, Leo, and Buddy
Us in the Redwoods, August 14, 2011: John, Ondine, Roy, Leo, and Buddy
Wow, we're into the second month of the year already! That's hard to believe, the more so because our Christmas stockings remain up, ever hopeful for a little something. John only got the tree down last Sunday.
Leo ran 21 laps in the Hearst Jog-A-Thon last week! We just got his tally card. That's 3-1/2 miles on the lower field, but he was running on the upper, which is bigger. He completed his memorization for class a few days early - it was a Martin Luther King, Jr. quote that's about three paragraphs long. He also - on his own - listened to the Spanish language learning CD he received in Spanish class.
Leo lost a tooth this week! It had been loose for weeks, months it seemed, and had been hanging by a thread for the past several days.
For Christmas, the boys received an Escher puzzle consisting of nine blocks that go together to make one of five well-known Escher drawings. The trick is, though, that you have to use mirrors, orienting and placing the cubes so that the image on the side of a cube reflects correctly in a mirror in the right position. We all tried to solve it, but Leo was the first to figure out the trick with the mirrors. So far, Leo has solved two pictures, and John has solved three. Roy has mastered a different puzzle in which you have to guide a steel ball along a 3-D track suspended within a transparent sphere.
Roy received his new passport from the State Department on Wednesday. It arrived just in time, since his previous passport expires February 23. This is his third passport! Roy's new passport expires in 2017, when he'll be 16 years old.
Roy had an orthodontic appointment with Dr. Miroue Wednesday afternoon. They cranked his braces out a bit, but this time he said it didn't hurt; it just felt weird. The next day, though, he needed Tylenol and had a hard time chewing food.
Roy and Leo visited Barbara for a couple hours on Tuesday. As they scampered through the bushes to her door, Barbara turned into her driveway, having just returned from a 350-mile round trip drive to Big Bear and back to check the heater! It was amazing that everyone converged at that very moment - Bill's hand at work!
Grammy's Christmas present to the boys was a check toward buying a telescope! John spent many happy hours researching just the right way to spend the money, and on Tuesday, the last day of a sale at Orion Telescopes, he pulled the trigger. They got an Orion StarMax 90mm tabletop Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope with a moon filter and a correct-image diagonal, plus a book called Turn Left at Orion. He ordered it Tuesday and the scope and book arrived Thursday!
So, Thursday evening after dinner and brushing teeth, John and the boys went into the front yard to do a little planet- and star-hopping. The first stop was the moon, which even with the low-power 25mm eyepiece looked eye-poppingly huge. They swung the scope around to Venus, which was just a larger disk, and Jupiter, which showed its moons just as clear as anything. Under high power, Jupiter's bands were clearly delineated. Then they paused at the Pleiades, which were much better with low power, and then John located the Orion Nebula. With low power the whole nebula is visible; with high power, the boys could see the Trapezium, a formation of four stars, in the midst of the gas cloud. Very cool!
Ondine during this time was out at an evening get-together with some co-workers. But, we set up the telescope again Friday night, and she got to look at the moon both with and without the moon filter, which arrived Friday afternoon.
Neighborhood gas prices remain steady at about $3.85 per gallon.
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