Cali became Chessie

Cali's name has been changed to "Chessie" after Chessie the kitten from the old train ads. (See example below).

They Hatched!

Only 3 hatched.
We found this one dead under the bush, the other one is AWOL. We had a funeral for this one.

Kitten Report

I have wanted a kitten since Christmas last year. I hope I get one this year for my birthday. They are cute, lovable, and funny. But there are many responsibilities. You have to feed them, love them and play with them but I think I can do that. I want with characteristics like this: comes to me when I come home, young enough to train, tabby or calico, friends with Toeser and Lulu, not too feisy, full of fun and cute. I would spend so much time with it, here is my daily routine: Wake up, feed it, eat my cereal, go to school, come home, cuddle, feed again, homework, train, eat my dinner, chores, play, snuggle, sleep. Thats a long day but it ought to be fun. These are my weekly chores: empty the litter box, brush, play, train, love play and pay attention. By Sam Sam got her wish, and here she is with a little 5 week-old bottle-fed kitten. She will be very friendly because she will depend upon Sam for a lot the next few weeks, like teaching her how to use the kitty litter box, and cleaning up her poop (especially on her fluffy hair- yuk).
Sam had to give her a bath to clean up the poop off of her tail and butt. Fun! Look, how much skinnier without the fluff!
Oh, but isn't she cute! Awwwww. She is very slightly calico (see the orange blurs?) so she was named "Calli".

Scratch

We've been working with a kids visual programming language called Scratch created by the Life Long Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. You can check it out and download the program at http://scratch.mit.edu/. Our first Scratch explorations were just checking out the sample projects included with the download. Scratch is based on manipulation of graphical characters called sprites using scripts constructed from modular program elements. Here's the interface showing some built-in characters that Sam was playing with.


C's first project involved taking photos of him with his bayonet and sword so he could set up an animation. It was more an exercise in Photoshop, but he had a good time learning how to select himself and export the pictures to Scratch. The background is from a Harry Potter printer projects CD.

There are four separate pictures (called costumes in Scratch) of him brandishing his weapon that make up his animation. We expect to use this project as the basis of a more complicated project later.


The script is simple--it just loops through the costumes with a delay to make it visible.

The kids will sit for hours just playing with the program. We've had neighbor kids over and gotten the same reaction. I burned them a CD with the program. This is a long way from the tty terminal we had in high school for our Basic programs. We would type them in and wait for our turn on the timeshare system. There's a pretty elaborate website set up at MIT that has projects submitted by kids of all ages from all over (parts of) the world. I uploaded one project I was playing with just to try it out. You can view it at http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/oldfogey/158563

Toast-O-Lator

A fabulous garage sale find introduced us to the cult of the Toast-O-Lator. After the Girl Scout pancake breakfast we stopped at a garage sale at an old rotten single-wide trailer. The elderly owners used the trailer as an office and to store piles of junk. The Toast-O-Lator kept drawing me back, so I asked if they had an outlet to see if it worked. The elements glowed, but there was no sign that the toast would move as it was clearly intended to. I offered them a dollar which they accepted, and I gave them a dollar for three watches that needed batteries which they'd told Sam she could have.



Upon taking the cover off the Toast-O-Lator it was clear that it hadn't been used much. I cleaned it up and plugged it in and, by George, the teeth worked. It turns out that the toast advancement mechanism works intermittently, so I need to take the bottom apart and clean and oil it. Another fine project with my boy. But our internet research has revealed a hidden world.

The Toast-O-Lator is revered among toast preparation fetishists, and ours is clearly well preserved. Who could resist the portholes or the angled toast alignment wires that ensure uniformly browned toast. Google it! There are many toasterhead sites and much material available about the "Aristocrat of Toasters" including the patent drawings for the toast advancement mechanism. We have not invested in any Toast-O-Lator clothing or oven mitts. I also highly recommend a video on YouTube titled "The March of the Muffins." The next time you visit you are welcome to try it more than once, if necessary.

Click on the photo for the full size image to see the toast advancement teeth. They move in a clockwise elliptical path. The rightward motion comes with the teeth above the horizontal bars, so the teeth lift and move the toast to the right. The leftward motion is below the bars, so the toast takes a break and waits for the next lurch to the right.

When Darth Comes Knockin'

We've got a stack of projects to catch up reporting on. This one goes back months.

A couple of years ago C got a re-gifted Darth Vader bank for his birthday. When you put in a coin, Darth would spin from side to side raise his light saber and say very loudly, "Impressive! Most impressive! But you are not a Jedi yet!" The whole production would go on with the Imperial March (Darth Vader theme) blaring. Mom really hated the noise, and there really isn't much question of why the thing was re-gifted. C peeled the rubber cape off to use with his action figures. He threw the rest out when he was cleaning his room.

I pulled it out of the trash and sat down with C to hatch our devious scheme. Mom had taken down the doorbell chime ages ago to paint, and since a real visitor comes up our driveway and rings the doorbell about three times a year, we never put it back up. This also reduced the barking in the house marginally. We would get Mom this time for sure.

C and I spent an afternoon deconstructing Darth and carefully extracting the parts that made the noise. Next we pulled the guts out of the chime and disconnected the transformer under the house so the bell button was just a switch. We reinstalled the chime, inserted Darth and connected the switch wires. Worked like a charm! Chime! (that is) We got our neighbor, P, to come ring the doorbell after Mom came home. She was in the bathroom--Oh well. But now we have the only Darth Vader doorbell in town and the only dog that barks when she hears the Imperial March. Next time you visit you can try it out--once.

Spring!

While working in the garden, I kept noticing a bird banging around by the screen porch. I'm embarassed at my poor powers of observation, and that I failed to figure out what was going on until today. We have two big Buddlea plants (planted from cuttings a couple of years ago) planted right up against the house. I peered into the shrub at a height of about 3 feet, and looked down into this nest: (the black hair is horse hair, from Jake the horse, next door, presumably)
So, we quietly waited in the garden to try and get a better look at the secret life of the birds:
If you look really carefully in this photo, you can see the bird, on the fence. (Look in the third screen on the right, in the lower right quadrant.)

Now that we are aware this is going on, we are realizing that we have to be very careful in certain parts of the garden, and certainly in the screen porch, if we want to see the babies succeed!

We think our bird is a Towhee. This link has more information, and the call. http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/California_Towhee.html#sound

Model Mission

California 4th graders for generations have had to make models of one of the California Missions as part of the standard curriculum. The girl is working on hers. The report is almost done, but the model hasn't had much progress, and its due on Monday.

We made a visit to the actual remains of the mission a couple of weeks ago.

Stay tuned for the model.

Our Hero, "Gourd Guy", and his adventures

How do you get a reluctant writer to write. Sigh. Lots of mean nasty threats and physical force do not seem to motivate, I've found. So, we got another copy of Don't Forget to Write from Dave Eggers 826 Valencia, writing workshop/pirate store, in San Francisco. I don't know what happened to the first copy of this we had, but even at the $26 price, it was worth it to buy another one and support this neat group.

Anyway, there are lots of really neat writing exercises in here, created by lots of REAL writers. The first one we tried was "Write your own comic". This was mom's project with the boy, so it took us a while, we worked on it about once a week for a while.

We really worked on the elements of the story (Introduction, The Plot Thickens, Climax, Denoument, Closing). He also developed each of his characters, including back-story, and sidekicks, etc (also including drawing samples to ensure ease of repetition). He developed his draft, figured out how it would all fit on the available space, created a cover, and re-traced the entire thing with black pen. If you'd like your own personal copy of this rare first edition comic book, send us an email. No self-addressed envelope required.

Oh, and he actually enthusiastically worked on this project! The final day (we were on deadline) he worked almost 3 hours straight. Unheard of.