Thursday, January 29, 2009

Science fair!

It's Science fair time, and JB would like to investigate how crystals grow. Daddy bought her a crystal growing starter kit, and she is ready to make a go of it.















It was a very complicated process, but she thinks she may have a good start. She also made a solution of salt, and one of sugar to investigate how salt and sugar crystals are formed.

We will show some results on our next post.

Monday, January 12, 2009

365 Project 2009


I was reading my sister's blog, when she mentioned a friend that had suggested a scrapbook 365 for 2009. I have heard of 365 challenges in the photography world. For example, the 365 portrait group that runs on flickr every year. The goal there is to take a self portrait every single day for a year. But sister's friends' suggestion (As I understood it) was to take a photo per day of your daily life, and "scrapbook" it in some way. I of course started late, but came up with the above image for the 1st through the 11th. My next week will start today (Monday 12) and I will have my weeks go from Monday to Monday. I will try to post the weekly compilation every Sunday afternoon. This should be interesting.

Monday, January 5, 2009

Spore!


We have a new addiction at our house. It involves little creatures trying to survive on little planets. This addiction started last August when Uncle Jeffy gave JB a new PC game for her birthday. It was really cute. She could create little creatures to her hearts content. They would sing, and dance, but that was about it. Then for Christmas, she used her Santa/Grandpa Great Christmas money to purchase the full on version of SPORE. All I can say is "WHOA!" This game involves creating a little one celled creature, assigning it a home planet, and then guiding it through various stages of evolution. So far Jb and I have created a cell who has survived the premordial soup, and has passed through the creature stage, and has evolved enough to form a little tribe of six creatures. This is where I believe our evolution is going to stop, however. JB is so kind and sweet, she wants to make friends with all of the other little tribes she comes in contact with. So her creatures sing songs and dance for the other creatures, who respond violently and end up attacking and killing all six members of her tribe. She doesn't have the heart to make them fight back, and frankly I am not smart enought to figure out how to make her kind/sweet/everyone play nice creatures evolve further without turning into killing machines themselves. Interesting metaphor isn't it? This IS just a game...right?