A tale of a frozen family

I don’t want to say it too loudly, for fear of jinxing myself, but holy moly…. it’s GORGEOUS today!!!!  For the last month or so it hasn’t been warmer than 60, at the very most.   I am discovering, since moving to south central Alaska that the summers just don’t get warm like they did in Fairbanks.   While Fairbanks may have -60 in the winter, it always had a spell of 90 or so in the summer as well.  I MISS THE HEAT!   But I digress.

Today is beautifully sunny and at 10am it was already 62 degrees!  I bet we might see 70 today (crossing fingers).

I begged the offspring to get up, get dressed and GET OUTSIDE!!!!   Of course, she can’t do anything without me taking pictures… so here we go:

I am astutely aware that it’s a good thing that we’ve got a new health insurance plan.  I have a feeling it may come in handy.  You see, she has the guts to be a dare devil, she just doesn’t necessarily have the skill that is required.   I see many ER visits in our future.

And I will say, that soccer has really helped with her ability run and not fall down every other step LOL

She runs like the WILD!  Breaking the speed of sound!

Mooooooommmmmmmmmmmmm are you taking my picture??????

In that case…. here…. let me cheese for you!

Okay, enough with the cheese… back to warrior rockwall princess!

It’s such a nice day that even the Franklin… who is painfully acclimated to antarctic temperatures thinks it’s TOO HOT!

I giggle at this picture because he reminds me of those cartoon animals that have the enormous heads and tiny body.   But then again, he does have a giant head. LOL!

Well, as boring as this entry may be…. it is entirely too gorgeous to spend another moment at this keyboard (although it does rock that I can sit on the deck as I type this!) I’m outta here to go endure a soccer tournament with the offspring, in which I’m sure she will kick my butt!  

Everyone enjoy your day!!!!

We have struggled over the last year with various Van de Graaff generators not really performing to a standard that we are happy with.   For those of you that don’t remember what a Van de Graaff generator is…. It’s that electrical machine with a big dome on top, that you put your hands on and your hair stands up… remember that one??? 

At any rate, after 3 disappointing models, we decided to heck with this and bought the BIGGEST, BADDEST Van de Graaff we could find.  This thing is ENORMOUS!!!!  It stands over 4 foot tall and I almost swear that the lights dim when you fire it up!

We did an experiment with it last night.  I stood on the rubber stool and placed both hands on the dome.  Certain that I was about to be shocked into orbit, I stood there shaking as hubby fired it up.  Now, you may ask why hubby wasn’t the test object for this experiment.  If you recall from the “eating fries and gravy picture”

Hubby has no hair.  Therefore, he was not a viable option for our test object.  This left me or the offspring.  Since the thought of having our offspring shocked into orbit was more frightening (although some days… it would be a welcome break!) I decided to bite the bullet and step up to the plate (or orb on this day).

With in seconds of it being on, I felt the little hairs on my arms standing up, and then my head followed.  Every ounce of my hair stood on end.  The force field on this thing is AMAZING.  Hubby was standing about five feet away from it, holding a florescent light bulb and it LIT!!!!  Can you say HOLY SMOKES????

He turned it off and I stayed with my hands on the orb, still fully charged.  Hubby went and got the camera and took this picture about 2 minutes AFTER it was turned off. 

With the force field being so wide, I was terrified to let him near it with my digital SLR bad boy camera, for fear it would zap it.  Therefore, the pictures were taken after the fact!

After that, we fired it up again.  Only this time, we’d see what would happen if we sprayed my hair with water.  AMAZING!  You would think it would weight it down, but it made it stand up even more.  

The next super cool, amazing, out of this world, TOTALLY FREAKING AWESOME experiment…….  I only put one hand on the orb… he turned it on… and I had LIGTENING BOLTS come out of my fingertip!  DUDE!!!! I HAD LIGHTENING COMING OUT OF MY FINGER!!!!   That was the coolest thing EVAH!

That is the upside of being in a business that teaches science to children….. we get to play with the COOLEST TOYS!

Here is a picture of the hubster, standing with “Frankenstein” as we’ve so lovingly named him.  He’s one cool dude!  Or would that be… “he’s got an electric personality”??  I know.. I know… I won’t quit my day job.  (oh wait, I don’t have a day job anymore!!!)

Yes, yes, I know… for those of you ready to lecture me.  I’m insanely behind in my blogging.   Since quitting work, and trying to readjust my daily schedule to help hubster as much as I can with the business, and keep the offspring from burning down the house, and trying to keep the house from being at condemned status, I find I’m not here much.  I AM working on that!

At any rate…..

The offspring graduated from preschool *sniff* but not in the normal sense.  You see, she misses the age cut off to start kindergarten.  She also misses the age cutoff for testing in (by 20 days) but because she’s a bit ahead of the curve adademically, she also can’t return to preschool next year.   She’s already bored to tears with the content…. but I digress.  Where was I???

Oh yeah, so she didn’t graduate in the traditional sense, like her classmates.  They will be going to kindergarten next year, and she will be home schooled.

Here she is with her best friend, before the ceremony.

And the entire graduating class.

The whole class sang the “graduation song”  which translates to “I’m not sure WHAT that song was… but it was so stinking CUTE!”

And finally… her walk… to get her bag of graduation goodies.   *sniff* my baby is growing up!

psssst…. did anyone notice she’s wearing a DRESS??????