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Leah and her friend Sailor enjoy a pop-up book together during a sleepover tonight. The book is Dragons & Mosters by Matthew Reinhart and Robert Sabuda.

It doesn’t get much better than this down home song on my Victrola. In case you have never heard this song, here is a very nice version by Allison Krauss and Lyle Lovett: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UxOcZgDOpc.Enjoy.

I welcomed in 2012 with the usual eats. Black eyed peas? Check! Cabbage? Check. Collards? YUCK, thank goodness for the peach juice. Check! And last but not least, the pork product of your choice. Check! Ummmm good and here’s to the new year.

Leah had the pleasure of entertaining Corduroy the class bear for the weekend. Every year Mrs. McCrary’s kindergarten class at Cumberland Trace Elementary school is graced with a class bear. The students take turns hosting the class bear for the weekend. Sarah had Buddy the Bear and this year Leah has Corduroy.

As promised I took Anna and Sarah to Chicago for the weekend. We had a blast. We purchased a CityPass which got us in the Shedd Aquarium, Field Museum, Art Institute, the SkyWalk at the top of Sears tower and the Science and Technology building (which we didn’t make it to). The hit of the trip as it turns out was Navy Pier as well as tea at the American Girl Doll store.

Leah dove off the board for the first time the day before this video was shot. I used the 8mm app to give it the old school look.

Testing out the share link from FLickr

Finally, I finished the 356 pages (and 756 pictures) of 2011 Adventure Book. Boy am I glad that is over! I pledge to do that progressively this year. Of course, I say that and I am practically in May already and I haven’t even uploaded pictures from 2011 to Flickr yet, let alone worked on the Blurb Booksmart book for 2011.

Well I made a couple things that were totally yummy this weekend. First there was biscuits and chocolate gravy followed up by bread pudding. I forgot to take a picture of the former but I remembered on the latter. Without further delay I present: Bread Pudding.

• 10 slices white bread, cut into cubes
• 1/4 cup butter, melted
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 cup raisins
• 6 eggs, beaten
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3 cups hot milk (160 degrees F/71 degrees C)
• 1 pinch ground nutmeg

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Lightly butter one 2 quart baking dish.
2. Combine bread cubes, butter, cinnamon and raisins; mix well and place in baking dish.
3. Beat together the eggs, sugar, vanilla and salt. Add milk, mix well and pour over bread cubes.
4. Sprinkle with nutmeg and bake for 25 minutes.

Jupiter will swing to within a mere 368 million miles of Earth on Monday night, making its closest pass in 47 years. The planet nears the Earth roughly every 12 years. This will be the closest the planet has come to Earth since 1963. It won’t be this close again until 2022. It can easily be seen with the naked eye at sunset in the east near the horizon, but a telescope affords an even better view. I managed to get this shot using my telescope and my iPhone.

You can clearly see the 4 Galilean moons in this shot. They are the largest of the many moons of Jupiter and derive their names from the lovers of Zeus: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. They were discovered sometime between 1609 and 1610 when Galileo made improvements to his telescope, which enabled him to observe celestial bodies more distinctly than had ever been possible before.

Pictures from our summer trip to tube at Deep Creek North Carolina (Bryson City). We also mined rubies at the Sheffield Mine.

Click here —> Full Screen Slideshow of Deep Creek Adventure

Finally finished the 2009 Adventure book – (Preview Book). 470 Photos in 240 pages using BookSmart by blurb.com. This is the third year I have used blurb.com to produce our custom print on demand annual. A new feature of the application I really enjoyed this year is that you can now edit the fixed layouts and create your own new custom layouts. I didn’t use that feature as much as I would like to have done on this years book mainly because of the rush to get it out. I intended to do more customization going forward. If I can just discipline myself to build this thing each month vs. the entire thing at the end of the year.

Below are links to the 2008 and 2007 books.

I highly recommend camping at Standing Stone State Park. I  went with “The Cousins”  and Anna and Sarah two summers ago. This park was amazing and it was very close to  Burgess Falls and you could easily take a day trip there as well. Since this trip, I have foolishly sold my Lexus, purchased a truck and pop-up so we can camp more frequently.

After driving by road signs for the last 40 years, I finally broke down and went to “See Rock City” and  Ruby Falls. I have to say it was worth it. Ruby falls is much more commercialized than Mammoth Cave and has been somewhat abused over the years. However, it is absolutely worth seeing.

Ruby Falls is a 145-foot high underground waterfall located within Lookout Mountain, near Rock City and Chattanooga, Tennessee in the United States.  The cave which houses Ruby Falls was formed with the formation of Lookout Mountain. The Lookout Mountain Caverns, which includes Ruby Falls Cave, is a limestone cave. These caves occur when slightly acidic groundwater enters subterranean streams and eats away at the relatively soft limestone, causing narrow cracks to widen into passages and caves in a process called chemical weathering. The stream which makes up the Falls entered the cave sometime after its formation.

We had a blast down in Navarre Beach this June. I found a new way to do slide shows using “SlideFlickr” and thought I would test it out here. You can even add music if you want, I opted to spare the audience and not use it this time. Anna, Sarah and Leah all had a wonderful time as did I.

I love you. The girls wanted to do something specials for you and sing you a song. Enjoy.

What the heck is oobleck?

That is the first question that comes out of everybody’s mouth when you mention the word oobleck. The earliest use of the word “oobleck” that I am aware of comes from the title of a Dr. Seuss book. In the book by Dr. Seuss, Bartholomew and the Oobleck a king bored with ordinary rain, sunshine, fog, and snow causes green precipitation called Oobleck to fall from the sky. The Oobleck proves so sticky that it gums up the whole kingdom, which is eventually saved by Bartholomew Cubbins, the title character from Dr. Seuss’ 1938 book The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. If you really want to learn more about oobleck, wikipedia goes into more detail about it is a dilatant fluids, polymers and psuedoplastics . . .

Oobleck is more commonly known among science teachers as the name for a substance made of cornstarch and water that has the peculiar ability to act like a liquid and solid at room temperature. Scientifically speaking, oobleck is a type of polymer. This means that it is made of very long chains of repeating molecules. Oobleck is also a non-Newtonian fluid, which means that its ability to flow changes when different amounts of pressure are applied to it. You can actually walk on it as long as you keep moving. More simply, if you squeeze oobleck, it will become brittle and crumble. If you just let it sit in your hand, it will drip and run like thin white school glue. Sound interesting? Try making some and explore it for yourself!

How to make Oobleck

• 2 Cups Corn Starch
• 1 Cup Water
• 1 Quart-size Zipper Locking Bag
• 1 Baking Pan (a small shallow Tupperware container works too)
• Optionally you can also add a few drops of liquid food coloring to color your oobleck green, like in the Dr. Seuss book.

Procedure

• Add the cornstarch to the zipper locking bag.
• Slowly pour the water into the bag.
• Gently knead the bag to mix the two substances. It should feel like thick pancake batter. Add more cornstarch if it is too thin or more water if it contains lumps of powdered cornstarch.
• Add a few drops of food coloring if desired. Pour the substance out into your baking tray.
• Poke your finger into the oobleck. What happens? Try to take a pinch of oobleck from the tray, squeezing your thumb and index finger as hard as you can. How does it feel? Pick up a handful of your amazing creation, let it drip from your fingers. Don’t be shy, explore what you can do with oobleck!
• You can store your oobleck in the bag that you mixed it in, but unless you want to do a biology experiment, don’t keep it for more than 2 or 3 days!

Discussion

Following the procedure will show you some of the properties of oobleck, but the real science of any procedure is found by exploring further. Once you get a feel for the ideal consistency of oobleck, you can try making a really large batch of it (maintain an approximately 2:1 ratio of cornstarch to water) so that you have more to work with.

Here are a few ideas for further exploration:

• Get several identical bowls and pour equal amounts of oobleck into each. What happens if you place objects of different masses on the oobleck. Do they sink? Float? Why?
• The ratio of cornstarch to water given in the procedure is 2:1, but this is only an approximation. Start with 2 cups of cornstarch and incrementally add small amounts of water to it. How much water do you need to reach your ideal oobleck consistency? What is the new cornstarch to water ratio? What is the maximum amount of water you can add before the oobleck loses its interesting properties? What is this ratio of cornstarch to water?

What about Glurch?

Solution #1

a 3:4 mixture of white glue and water (e.g. 3/4 cup of white glue to one cup of water)

Solution #2

Saturated water/borax. Add enough borax that it won’t dissolve any more. This is approximately 3 tablespoons of Borax to 1 cup of water.

Directions

Add some food coloring (for effect only, not required to make the glurch work) to one of the two solutions then mix 3:1 of the first solution to the second. For example, 6 tablespoons of #1 to 2 tablespoons of #2. Stir together quickly or you may get an very dense blob in the middle. Stir/knead the glurch until it is of a uniform consistency. Or, since 3 tsp = 1 tbsp, use tablespoons to measure #1 and the same number of teaspoons to measure #2.

Here are some of my favorite photos that we have taken lately. Also I was testing out NexGen Gallery with the postcard viewer option. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Follow the more link to see the NexGen slideshow.
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