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Remember that heat wave we had last month?
Seems impossible to imagine with all the cold weather we've got now,
but it was hot enough for the beach. |
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We did a home-school trip to the
San Diego Archaeology
Center. It was a bit of a bust, though. The take-away lesson:
dinosaurs are not archaeology (they are paleontology). Dinosaurs are
fun! Archaeology, not so much.
I love this photo, because it illustrates clearly why we love
home-schooling so much. Everybody is paying attention except our
kids, who are at the top of the amphitheater just doing their own
thing. I can't imagine sending them into school, it would be
brutal. |
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Feeding the lorakeets is a lot of fun. At
one point, Mia
had so many on her she could barely hold her arm up. |
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Desmond was a bit afraid of the birds, so
Naomi kept him close. |
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The petting zoo is always a favorite. I
think Mia is getting her courage up to pet the deer. |
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If you don't have any food on you, the
animals are petty calm. God forbid you do have food, then it's a
free-for-all. |
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We made a trip out to Arizona to visit my
brother, and we really enjoyed ourselves. The water was freezing,
but Mia insisted on going in. We warmed her up in the bathtub
afterwards. |
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Dave has a 14-foot trampoline that is just
awesome, except for the fact that there's no net around it. Anybody
who does any research at all on how dangerous trampolines are knows
that without a net you're asking for trouble. He used to have a net
but the home-owner's association made him take it down. |
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Desmond had a good time visiting with
everybody. My dad was also visiting at the same time as us, so it
was nice to have everybody together. |
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We went to the
Waldorf Elves Faire in
Pasadena and it was a really nice school. There was a lot to do. The
girls went fishing and eventually caught a necklace kit. |
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Painting river rocks at the Elves Faire. |
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Digging for gems and rocks at the Elves
Faire. |
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This is outside the Angel room, where
angels let you pick out a gift for somebody you like. I liked this
picture because you can see how similar Desmond's hair color is to
Mia's. Desmond is holding an orange that they poke with a
candy-cane. |
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I was looking for a quick and dirty way to
do stop-motion animation, and I found an idea for using a
white-board to quickly draw and erase images. Along with free
software,
MonkeyJam, it was pretty easy to do basic animation. It was hard
to communicate to Amelie and Mia that the point is not to draw, but
to draw movement. We've done four or five so far, but they're just
simple animations. In the
background are my two servers with over 60TB of storage. That's
right, 60TB! I'm upgrading it this month to 72TB, though, since I'm
already out of space.
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Whenever Desmond gets a hold of wicked
witch hummus (made with spirulina), he turns into a giant green
monster. |
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Desmond is still the happiest baby we've
ever seen. He's just so loving, it's crazy. His speech is starting
to come in, too, so he's a little chatter-box these days. |
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We recently celebrated the first Sunday of
Advent, and it was a lot of fun. The kids walk the spiral with an
un-lit candle and then an adult seated in the middle has a lit
candle that the child uses to light their candle. As they walk back
out of the spiral they put the candle down along it. |
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After our rat Snowflake passed away, we
got a pair of white dwarf Russian hamsters. They're supposed to be
pretty tame if you handle them enough. The girls carry them around
all the time. One is named Snowy and one is named Crystal, but it's
impossible to tell them apart. At night, they are completely nuts,
though. Naomi said they'll run five miles a night around their cage
and in the hamster wheel, and I believe it. They are constantly in
motion. They're pretty good pets, but I still prefer a nice rat. |
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That's it for this month. Until next
month, I hope you're having a ball! |
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