Darla the Great, the district librarian, took me up in her plane today. Flying in a tiny plane in the bush is pretty much exactly what I’d expected, except two to three times more awesome. The best part? Darla took a picture of me flying.
PS: this has a LOT to do with how I plan to spend next summer :)
Make sure you click on the picture; panoramas suck when they’re tiny-size.
But not so much of a whirlwind, berrypicking is actually pretty relaxing, except for the velociraptor-like mosquito attack.
Last burger and last breakfast in Anchorage, then the first meal in Unalakleet:
..that I could be more excited about my job.
And tonight I started to look at the resources recommended to me by the akt2 staff.
And now I’m more excited.
Really, really really WAY more.
I turned on my computer a few minutes ago to start working on tomorrow’s lesson plan and the first thing I see is this picture my dear little sister sent me. Lesson planning can wait a few minutes, this is important.
No further ado..
So we all sit down one day and Oh hey, one of us got this crazy idea: lets make a model of the universe! And for now we’ll keep it simple, stick with just our galaxy and the Horsehead Nebula. Good? Good.
Here’s how it goes down. We make little models of the planets, all to scale, perfect scale, and we lay them out on a round table. How big were the planets? We used perfect scale…the sun, you can hardly see it, but we managed, made it happen. The sun is 0.015mm. Tiny bright yellow speck in the middle of the table. The planets? It was tough, but we made it happen, nicely painted and all. It was kinda tough to see ’em on the table, and what we presume to be far-larger-than-scale solar winds (it’s warm outside, so the ‘close the window’ idea got veto’ed quicker than a tea party filibusterer pork barrel bill*) kept blowing our planets all askew. So we glued them down and made labels. Easy.
And the horsehead nebula?
The horsehead nebula, in our model universe scaled to fit the solar system–home–on the top of a table, is properly located halfway between the earth and the moon. Nothing some good amateur rocketry couldn’t handle. Oh yeah! Almost forgot to mention, the model of the old horsehead, that was the hardest part. Little bit bigger than twice the size of Seattle.
*I proudly know next to nothing about politics.
Taken July 14, 2012 by Steven D
Do the best in the world ever just goof around? Why yes, yes they do. More than all the ‘best’ soccer videos on youtube combined this one left me grinning my face off and wishing I could go play soccer. I hope you enjoy it like I did (fair warning: it’s probably pretty boring to non-soccer-heads).
The best part? Toss up. Pinto’s goal and Valdez’s beautiful solo stuff into the gym floor.
Dad here, he’s such a Shutterbug. Mom? Same.
Gee, I wonder where I got it from.
