Easter Cooks

Easter was a quiet affair this year.  A bit of fuss, a bit of muss, but nothing of the scale it has been in the past.

We rather like it that way.

James was on the hook to assist in the kitchen. He even dressed the part, putting on the special holiday-only apron with the picture of Half Dome on the front.  Not quite the traditional Easter garb, but festive enough for the occasion.

Cheryl, as always, directed the show with her usual flair.  We pulled out the best dishes from her collection and filled them with all manner of yummy comestibles; we laid out the good plates and the real silverware to brighten up the table.  We used real candles and real decorations and then sat down and ate a real dinner with real conversation and got really, really stuffed.

Afterward, we let the dishes sit around for a few hours while we caught up on our Dr Who episodes on Netflix, then it was time to tackle the mountain of dishes and get everything spic-and-span again in time for the following day, when there would be little or no time to deal with such things.

Most weeks there is barely enough time to handle the ordinary meals, let alone the special ones.

 

It was a Good Friday

Every morning I wake up and fix the cats their breakfast, put all my things together for work, and then spend a few minutes taking care of some random little green things that happen to be sucking up the sunlight in a daily mission to grow larger and larger until they take over the planet.

Last year, there was a tomato, a survivor of two seasons, but it didn't survive this past winter.  At least, I don't think it did.  It's sitting in the garage, all wilted and dry.  Lifeless.  Or maybe just Zombified.  Hard to tell with plans. I may try to revive it once things warm up a bit more. Don't tomatoes need warm weather?

There's the broccoli plant, a survivor of two winters.  It is going gang-busters.  And I spoil it rotten, giving it the corner spot with two - count 'em, two! - windows. And sunlight blasts through those windows all day long, energizing it like a battery.  The plant has grown tall and strong.  The leaves are big and broad.  The only danger it faces is the nearness of the cat tree.

You know how cats love plants.

Then there is the amaryllis. This bizarre plant has existed for the last year with only two very long leaves sticking out of a very small pot.  The leaves extend out nearly three feet. The plant takes very little water; indeed, it seems to pull the water right out of the air.  I'm afraid of giving it too much; I read somewhere that too much water will effectively drown them.  So only a little each morning.  Just enough to wake it up.

I put the amaryllis near the sliding glass door in the kitchen where it gets blasted by sunlight most days.  For the last year, it hasn't done much of anything.  Then, suddenly, one day - boom!  This huge stem comes out of nowhere, and a week later, there's this almost-flower thing sticking out the top. Kinda reminds me of Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors.  I wonder if it eats cats?

There's a strawberry plant, but it's boring.  No strawberries yet.  And very, very thirsty all the time. I don't expect it to do anything until (again) the warm weather is here to stay; and then it'll be hung out on the back deck where it will happily start producing little strawberries for Cheryl's salads.  I hope.

Then there's the Mutt plant. I don't recall what is in that pot.  It used to be a single type of plant, but other plants have crawled in there and joined the neighborhood, so now it's kind of like a multi-cultural non-melting pot (it would be a tragedy if the pot actually melted!) full of weird but cute little plants that seem to be just doing their thing, growing leaves and stems, and putting out no aroma whatsoever.

I guess they're not herbs.

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Deb

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Deb likes to vacuum.  She told me so.  I got a picture of her here cleaning up the family room, vacuuming, dusting, whatever.  Kind of took me by surprise because she doesn't get that industrious about housecleaning during the normal school year.  But Spring Break is an exception.  Either she was bored, or she suddenly took notice of the fact that the room needed some serious cleaning.  That's what happens when one spends the majority of ones time in ones own house, I suppose.

I don't mind.  It's nice to get the cat fur cleaned up occasionally.

When she's not vacuuming, babysitting, cooking, or reading, she's writing.  She's completed the second or third draft of her first novel and is currently working on the sequel.  (That means that her first novel is in review and editing by whichever crazy volunteers she can find to take on the job.)  Looks like the laptop was a good investment!  She barely lets go of it.  And stays up til all hours of the night, writing her stories and laughing at her own dialog.

Sometimes the cats help, surrounding her while she writes so that she doesn't get distracted by other things.  Or maybe they just like all the warm air that comes out of the laptop.  Kind of hard to tell.  They don't say much.  Just sit there, sleeping, snoring, purring, or just watching the world go by.

Sometimes Cheryl convinces her to put the laptop down for a while and do something different, like sewing or cooking or playing games.  Or putting puzzles together.  We have a lot of puzzles.  And we like to sit around working on puzzles and watching our favorite shows on Netflix.

Robo-obsession

The first thing you must understand is that none  of my children are the least bit interested in Robotics. None.  Not so much as an inkling of interest.  They're all into things like Art and Music and Literature, Philosophy, Theology.  You know, things that don't actually do anything, other than to make the world a much more pleasant place to live.

Not a gear-head among 'em.

Well, what is a poor engineer to do with such a swaddle of progeny?

Red Storm Robotics - #3875

It really wasn't my idea, this getting involved in Robotics.  I was horn-swoggled, bamboozled, tied up and tossed into the back of the cart like yesterday's rubbish and hauled off to the other side of the High School - you know, the side where they do things like Carpentry and Metalwork and Electricity and Plumbing, cutting huge timbers into joists and forming furniture from the scraps that fall off the trees.

Industrial Arts.  Vo-Tech.  Where they teach Useful Trades.

I admit, it was the smell that took hold of my brain and reduced it to the consistency of sawdust.  That smell - that wonderful, sweet, captivating smell from my youth.  The alluring scent of freshly-cut plywood.  Pine boards.  Oak.  Mahogany.  Cedar.  Oh, no drug in the world, no perfume made by the hands of man can compete with the sweet smell of the castings from the miter saw, the sander, the shaper, the file.

And that would have been enough if they hadn't tossed that other smell along with it, the smell of circuitry, of electronics, of soldering pencils and rosin-core solder, of overheating transistors and spinning motors.  There was no resisting it now.

I was dragged in three years ago, kicking and screaming.  And found, actually much to my regret, that I truthfully didn't have the time available.  My adventure lasted only a short while before work took over and there was nothing left.

Last year, it was a slightly different tale.  There was more time, but alas!  How can I justify being involved in an activity in which none of my children have an interest?  I survived the season.  Somehow.  But felt horribly guilty about it the entire time.

And this year.  I had planned on abandoning them all by the first of the year, after having attended nearly all the sessions prior to Christmas.  But as it turned out, there was no other mentor available to teach them the proper wiring and electrical knowledge they needed.  There was no choice.  It had to be me.

And I secretly smiled.  Because I do love these children.  They are not mine, they share no genetics with me, but they do share an obsession with the robot, an obsession that has lain dormant inside of me for lo these forty hears.

Competing at Gull Lake

Of course, I have my objections to the current methods.  After all, when I started doing robotics, it was all hand-made, home-made, DIY, making things up as you go, a veritable Wild West of random gears, motors and circuitry.  These days, it's corporate sponsorships, minimum purchases, well-defined Lego-style structures, and your choice between one or two main suppliers for all your Robotics needs.

I miss the days of the Wild West.

On the plus side, there's more to do than simply bolting together an Erector Set framework and a set of wheels and motors, wiring in a set of controllers and calling it good.  Now there are actual programming languages, stepper motors, sensors, video cameras, wireless routers, and all manner of bells and whistles we only could dream of in those long-lost days.

But I don't really care about the hardware, not really.  It's not the metal that matters, it's the mind behind it.  The learning mind.  The high-school student who is fascinated enough to learn about electronics, motors, computers, physics.

And there are students who have very little interest in the robots themselves, but are very interested in organizing projects, spreading the word, marketing, fundraising, and all those other horrible things that have to be done to get a project off the ground but I'd rather not be doing.  People who actually look forward to attending competitions, learning cheers, wearing silly costumes, dancing to silly music, and generally trying to make sure everyone else is having a good time.

Some days we're Blue, Some days we're Red

Me, I just want to make robots that think and move and do.  But I love being with the kids who want to do so much more.  They have such a heart for it. And for each other.  And they don't mind us old folks hanging around and helping out!

We spent a long time working on this.  Prep work started way back at the beginning of the school year.  We taught the kids how to plan things out, how to set things up. Then, right after the beginning of the year, we got our Challenge from the FIRST folks, and we went to work putting all those plans into fruition, coming up with our solution to the problem, framing a basic robot and filling in all the details.  January, February and March were spent - multiple nights per week - accelerating the pace of the construction until we had turned those designs out of our heads and into reality. 

And then we took it on the road, to Competitions.

First to Gull Lake High School, for a 2-day intense series of battles pitting two teams of 3 in cooperative alliance against each other.  We were #6 out of 40. We made it to the Finals.  And we fought well.  But we didn't finish as high as we had hoped.

Then the big competition at Grand Valley State University.  Another two days, another series of alliances and battles.  We didn't do so well at that one.  We got as high as #29 out of 40.  But there were other teams with superior alliances and better solutions. We didn't make it to the finals that time.  We had to be satisfied with what we had accomplished.

And we had accomplished a lot.  We had built a solid team, a group of friends with a common goal of learning, working together, playing together, competing together.

And then it was all over.

Til next year.

Will Build Robots for Food

Possumbly

We haven't seen one of these creatures up live and personal since ... well, I can't remember when.  So it was quite a surprise when this one came ambling across the backyard and hunkered up next to the house like it was warming itself next to a campfire.  It was cold and snowing at the time; perhaps that is exactly what the little varmint was doing.  But it isn't something we're used to seeing here in the suburbs.  Most of the time when we catch a glimpse of these furry little things, it is when they have become a silent, motionless lump of inanimate flesh (and not because they are playing "possum") after an encounter with a high-speed vehicle on a two-lane road that just happens to run perpendicular to the main thoroughfare of the woodland residents.  Somewhen the night before, or perhaps in the early morning hours, someone came over the crest of a little hill and noticed the sparkle of those black, beady eyes as they popped up out of nowhere in the middle of the road, right before that sickening *crunch* when the driver realized it wasn't just a trick of the headlights, or the reflection of a piece of glass on the road, but the last moments of some unlucky animal's life.

Up close and personal, they are not the prettiest animals in the world.  Kind of like a huge, misshapen rat with a head that looks swollen from a few rounds of boxing, ambling across the grass like it's had too much dandelion wine, with steady, unblinking eyes as though it had some dark, secret purpose.

This one's purpose was, apparently, to snuggle up next to our house in a vain attempt to get warm.  We tracked his steps through the basement window, watching in growing alarm as he maintained his wobbly, unwavering pace all the way across the yard until he stopped against the side of the house, just beyond our field of view.  I thought for a few moments about letting the cats out to deal with it, but then my brain kicked in and it occurred to me that a rabid rodent was more likely to hug a house than a reasonable one, and it wouldn't pay to have such a disease transferred from the non-domestic to the domestic; so instead I ventured forth to the backyard myself, armed to the teeth with my charm and wit (and a few Tarzan yells I'd learned from Johnny Weissmuller) and prepared to do battle.  But the nimble rodent had evidently overheard my plot from behind the basement window.

He was gone.

We Got Culture, We Got Rhythm

It has been a very busy set of weekends.

On Saturday, February 23rd, we attended the Grand Rapids Symphony's performance of "An American in Paris".  The following Friday, we attended their performance of Respighi.  The very next night, we attended the Grand Rapids Civic Theater's production of Fiddler on the Roof.

Whew!  Are we all cultured out yet?

Probably not. 

That's one of the reasons I married this wonderful girl: she's classy, cultured, and very knowledgeable about such things.  (Here I must give credit to her wonderful parents, who raised her to appreciate the finer things in life!)  I knew I was in the right place very early on when spending an evening at her parents' house meant sitting in the living room listening to classical music on the home-built stereo while talking about such varied topics as children's ministry, family history, basketball (!?), electronics, auto mechanics, spacecraft, and whether Alan would ever survive college.  (He did.)

Because of her, my life has been filled with wonderful music, soothing melodies, rousing symphonic passages, and inspiring anthems.

After all, one can't listen to Bruce Springsteen twenty-four hours a day.

Here is a list of the music we enjoyed on those first two evenings.  I'll presume you are familiar enough with "Fddler on the Roof" that I won't have to remind you of those tunes.

An American in Paris

"The Great Swiftness" - Andrew Norman
"City Noir" - John Adams
"Fountains of Rome" - Respighi
"An American in Paris" - Gershwin

Notes: I was very tired before we arrived at this concert, and my eyes were dried out from all the cold winter air, so it was difficult to keep my eyes open.  I found it quite restful, though, to close my eyes and just let the music fill my head.  "City Noir" reminded me of the detective stories I'd been reading lately; like standing on the corner downtown with the air full of mist and dark alleys with sinister people looking out darkened windows at a single streetlamp where a guy is waiting for a bus. "Fountains of Rome" ran the gamut of emotions from sweeping meloncholia to sprightly dancing; would've been nice to have pictures of the fountains projected on the walls.  Luckily, we'd recently re-watched "Three Coins in a Fountain", so the images were still fresh in my mind.  As for "An American in Paris", it was quite different to hear it while not watching Gene Kelly.  Different images came to mind: some from my junior high French text book, of city scenes in black and white; of smiling French people in post-war Paris, street vendors, children going to school.  Fresh croissants, mmmm.


Handel, Bach, Respighi

"Concerto Grossi, Opus 6, No. 4" - Handel
"Concerto Grossi" - Avner Dorman
"Fuga (Ricercata)" - Bach
"Concert in D for Strings" - Stravinsky
"Ancient Airs and Dances" - Respighi

Notes: Not quite so tired this time, but the eyes were still dry, so spent some time with them closed, just absorbing the music.  Interesting to hear the "Concerto Grossi" and then a kind of tribute to it, by an Israeli composer.  He was actually there at the concert, and the director asked him to comment on his composition, its inspiration, etc.  Mr. Dorman was a bit reticent - who wants to brag? - but he did a fair job of explaining his methodology.  And his piece was quite good, although perhaps not something I'd listen to repetitively.  Bach was an interesting interlude piece.  Stravinsky was good, as always.  Respighi was very interesting.  I'm going to have to listen to that one again.  Some very familiar passages contained within.  Where have I heard those before?

Fiddler on the Roof

The main draw for this performance was the fact that our Orchestra director, Eric, was playing the part of the Fiddler. In the movie version, to my recollection, the Fiddler doesn't appear in many scenes; in this production, he was in almost all the scenes - not speaking, but commenting with his fiddle.  Eric is a master, and the production was excellent.  The man playing Tevye was interesting because his accent was so familiar, like Topol in the movie.  Some of the other actors had good Russian accents, or Yiddish, or other ethnicities.  Some had no accent at all.  It was kind of odd, but didn't get in the way of the story.  The nightmare scene with Lazar Wolf's wife was hilarious.  How ever did they do that?  Good thing there weren't any children in the audience!  They would've been frightened out of their wits.  Come to think of it, perhaps I was!

Our next classical evening will be with Vivaldi's Four Seasons.