Sick

I'm home from school today. I had a fever and sore throat yesterday. Today, my throat is so sore that I don't even have any voice at all. I've been trying to put my fingers in my mouth to get out whatever bad stuff is in my throat, but this isn't working at all. It's no fun being sick.

Artistic Weekend

It was raining this weekend. That made for a perfect time to pursue creative arts. On Saturday morning, we put together some cool shots of Hot Wheels cars racing around Tuscany. Do make these shots, we found a nice travel book of Tuscany for the background and then used th black foamboard thing for the road. Here is the best shot:



Later, we did some painting. Daddy got out a bunch of art books, and I found a painting by Monet that I liked. We tried to imitate this painting using tempera on the big easel. Here's the result:



Finally, today we made some really goofy clone shots. I decided it would be fun to play Candyland with my clones. Of course, I had to change outfits and hats a zillion times since my clones would not be wearing the same thing as me. Here's the shot:



Following this, I played Candyland a couple of times (and soundly beat Daddy thanks to the help of Queen Frostine). No clones were playing.

Lunar Eclipse

Lunar Eclipse 20th Feb 2008
Originally uploaded by fwwidall

Last night we got to see something really cool--a lunar eclipse. We went out every 5 minutes or so to see how the eclipse was going. It got darker and darker and soon the moon was completely gone. A little later we went out to see the moon start to reappear.

Using some of my play balls, Daddy showed me how the Earth cast a big shadow on the moon by getting in between it and the sun. It was very neat!

Painting

Mommy got out the tempera paints for an exciting session of painting. We made a number of watercolors last week, so this seems to be a recurring theme. I made a picture of a sliding board. Mommy's colorful picture consisted of a rainbow spiral of Archimedes type of thing.



I love the feel of the brush on the paper. I also love the bright colors and the texture of the paint.

Let it rain

While I don't normally like rain, it's pretty fun when you make your own rain. Daddy and I did a flower photo shoot yesterday at dusk. Since flowers kind of look nice in the rain, we decided to get out a watering can and make it rain on the flowers while filming the "rainstorm". This is the best kind of rain because you don't even get wet.



You can see the highlights from the photo shoot here.

The amusing thing is that the flowers in the shoot are all in vases from Valentine's Day. The dew is created by using a water squirt bottle. The rain, of course, is courtesy of my bee watering can. The puddle is from the aftermath of the rain. Photography can be pretty sneaky you know.

Games, games, games

Daddy and I played a whole bunch of games on Saturday: baseball, golf, mini golf (although I didn't play well), and croquet. I had the yellow ball to show that I was the Oakland A's while Daddy had the red ball (for the Boston Red Sox). The way we play is that I get three shots to Daddy's one shot. In the first match, I built up a decent lead, but Daddy managed to come back at the very end for the win. The second game was pretty much a rout---I tore through all the wickets and finished the course while Daddy was still only about halfway done.

The Marshmallow Project

To celebrate the 100th day of school, we had to do an important building project--we had to construct something out of precisely 100 toothpicks and marshmallows. This seemed like a huge amount of work, so I tried some smaller versions as well as sketched some plans earlier in the week. One of my small projects was a porcupine with a marshmallow body and toothpick spines. This seemed promising since you can add spines until the total number of things adds up to 100. I sketched a marshmallow and toothpick Aidan on my whiteboard. I even attempted to create eyes, nose, and mouth by writing on the marshmallows with Sharpie marker. While this was great in concept, getting an actual marshmallow Aidan to stand up proved difficult.

Finally, yesterday was the big day for creating the full scale model. Mommy and I worked together on a marshmallow house. This was working out nicely until the roof collapsed and destroyed the whole structure. Since it took the better part of an hour to make the house, we were both very unhappy.



Eventually, we went back to the porcupine idea and built that. However, we found that the porcupine looked more like a turtle at scale, so we changed it to a turtle. At last, the marshmallow project was complete. I used 60 marshmallows and 40 toothpicks in making the turtle.

Here's a documentary video.



Here's a link to some photos of the project in progress.

Cool Structure

I built a very cool structure with my magnetic building toys. I consists of a whole series of interlocking triangles. Inside a bunch of the little pyramids, I place Hershey's Kisses to complete the look. I like it.

Super Tuesday

As you know, there was a big bunch of elections on Tuesday. My stuffed animals also had elections as well. I picked animals to be each of the candidates. Barack Obama was a tiger, Hillary Clinton was a leopard, John McCain was a puppy dog, and so on. I used my whiteboard to post the election results. In the primary, Barack Obama manged to defeat Hillary while Mitt Romney managed to defeat the others. Then came time for the general election. The election board I made is shown above. On the left is Mitt. you can see that I tried to spell his name (Mit Rone) and drew a picture of him. On the right is Barack. I abbreviated his name as simply "B". Since Barack is black, I used black market to draw him (except for his hair, which is blue just like Romney's). Up above are the party labels--R for Republican and D for Democrat.

The final tally--Mitt got 5 votes while Barack triumphed with 8.

Wheat Painting

In church school yesterday, we did a fun art project, painting with wheat sheaves. Apparently, long ago these were the standard paintbrushes of the time. They're pretty hard to work with. In fact, one of my pictures has a bunch of wheat seeds embedded in it. It was a lot of fun painting with these odd brushes.

Rainy Season

We're in the midst of rainy season, and I was dying t0 get outside. Finally, there was a break in the rain, so Daddy and I flew paper airplanes out in the backyard. Paper airplanes sure don't survive well when landing on wet ground. Still, it was a lot of fun building and destroying them. I also splashed about in various puddles with my trusty dalmatian boots.

Super Bowl Sunday

It was a very exciting Super Bowl played today. I was rooting for the Patriots since the Giants eliminated my beloved Packers two weeks ago. Sadly. despite a great effort from the Pats, it wasn't to be. The Giants won in the closing seconds of the game. I've been very into football this weekend. Daddy and I did lots of blocking drills. I also posed for a photo session with my various helmets. We used Daddy's new black background to isolate the subject of the portrait from all background.



(Apparently, Daddy used this for his roses shots as well.)

Anyway, many of these turned out great. You can check the shots out here.

Talent Show

I'm trying out for the Alamo School talent show next week. I hope I get in. For my tryout, I'll be singing the song "Take me out to the ballgame." I've also worked out a bunch of fun hand gestures to go along with the song. Naturally, I'll be all dressed up in A's gear to complete the look. Wish me luck.