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drorzel | February 13, 2016SteelyKid was sent home on Wednesday with strep throat, and so needed to be home thursday as well. she was very disappointed to be missing school, as her class was preparing for a Valentine's Day party on Friday. I picked up a bunch of work for her, including a heart-shaped paper pouch to hold the cards the kids would exchange.
You wouldn't've known she was officially sick on Thursday-- her energy level was basically at normal. She powered through a bunch of homework, and then set to decoarting the pouch with hearts and happy stick figures in a rainbow of colors. And also a fishtank:
Detail…
drorzel | February 12, 2016Some time back, I posted a photo of my usual spot at the Starbucks in Niskayuna. When I was in Newport News earlier this week, of course, I had to find a different space from which to rant about Twitter. Here's that spot:
My "office" when I was in Virginia.
As you can see, the principal difference between the two is that I didn't bring my stainless-steel travel mug with me on the trip. The store in Newport News is laid out almost exactly the same way as my regular one in Niskayuna.
I'm probably more amused by this than any of my readers will be, but then, this was the only remotely photo-…
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 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, 2016Random artsy shot from our back yard. This is the little bit of roof right over our back door. It's the only bit of roof left on the house that's asphalt shingle-- the main roof was always slate, and we got the bit of shingle above the garage replaced with fake slate not long after we bought the house. As a result, it collects crap in a way that the other bits don't. But it looks kind of cool and decrepit:
Pine needles and moss on the small roof over our back door.
Or maybe not. I dunno. Anyway, I noticed it, and it looked cool to me, so I took a photo.
drorzel | February 4, 2016Early in this photo-a-day thing I tried to get in the habit of bringing the camera with me when I ran errands, to get pictures of random interesting stuff outside of the immediate neighborhood of our house. I fell out of that, though, when it was actually cold, because I didn't like leaving the camera in the car in freezing temperatures.
I had it with me last night, though, because I was taking SteelyKid to Odyssey of the Mind practice. Which was good, because while we were getting our traditional fast-food dinner beforehand, there was a really cool-looking sunset:
Sunset over Niskayuna.…
drorzel | February 4, 2016Here in the US, we're slowly transitioning to the European system of chip-based credit cards (I got email at work saying that my new card there will actually be chip-and-PIN, wonder of wonders). This is not uniformly distributed yet, though, so about half of the retailers I deal with regularly want the chip, the other half want the old-school swipe. If you guess wrong about a particular store, the terminal will blat loudly and annoyingly at you, so I end up asking cashiers all the time "Are you guys doing the chip thing yet?"
One local store apparently got sick of that, and modified their…
drorzel | February 2, 2016This one was a whole bunch of work for one smallish shot...
So, in past rounds of "science-y things with my fancy camera," I looked at the effect of ISO settings and apertures. This time out, I wanted to look at something moving, and the way that it blurs with increasing exposure time.
My initial thought was to try to take pictures of a falling ball, but it's too hard to get that to work consistently without setting up some kind of electronic trigger, and I wasn't willing to do that. But, of course, a swinging pendulum will always be in a relatively narrow range of positions, making it a…
drorzel | February 1, 2016When Kate and I were looking for a house back in late 2002, one of the things that sold us on this place was the back yard. The lot is very deep, unusually so for this part of Niskayuna, so there's a lot of space in the back yard, and it was pleasantly shaded by trees. We've since taken down the maples that were on the south side, but there's an enormous oak in the northeast corner that we've left in place, which is a really nice tree.
Our neighbor to the north, however, was not as fond of this tree, as she was really into gardening, and the oak casts much of that yard in shade. When we were…
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…
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 15, 2016We have a couple of bird feeders near the house, one just outside the bay window in the front of the house, and the other on the side of the house right next to the dining room. (That one used to be farther out in the yard, where it functioned well as a means of luring bunnies and squirrels into the yard for Emmy to chase, but we took out the trees it was hung from, so had to move it...)
I try to remember to keep these filled up, because they're a reliable source of entertainment, even in the winter months. We got a bunch of activity at the feeders today, including a blue jay, and I ended up…
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 12, 2016Having picked up a new phone last week, it seems sort of appropriate to give a photo-a-day to a picture taken with that phone, as a kind of test. Also, I realized while on the way to SteelyKid's taekwondo class that I had forgotten to take any photos with the good camera, and wanted some insurance.
So, here's a shot of the very early crescent moon just after sunset, taken from the parking lot at Panera where we got dinner before class.
Crescent moon just after sunset, taken with my new phone.
Which, you know, isn't too bad, given the kind of difficult lighting conditions. This is, of…
drorzel | January 11, 2016One of my recurring half-serious grumbles about this photo-a-day business is that our neighborhood doesn't offer a clear view of the horizon, making it impossible to get nice sunset pictures. On sunday afternoons, though, we have a babysitter come stay with the kids for a while so Kate and I can do some work, and at this time of year, that window includes sunset. And my work yesterday took me to campus, where there are much better horizon views. Of course, it was grey and dreary for most of the day, but just before sunset, the clouds to the south and west lifted a bit, just enough to be…