Science Fun (part 2), now with poster printables

There's nothing quite like playing with legos indoors while waiting for the next Nor'easter to hit.  Hardly any snow in February, and now 4 blizzards in March.  But we don't mind.  It gives us more time to work on our personal projects.

The human and her male counterpart did their best to raid the AG store back in January, and we're still reaping the benefits.  Lily has claimed the new dinosaur t-shirt.  We have all learned from past experience that we do not ask about what exactly Lily is making in the lab.  It's better for everyone that way.

Human interjection:

A quick review of some of the new clothes (the t-shirt from the NASA souvenir set, and the dinosaur t-shirt):  they run small.  Sized for dolls with a 10.25" waist and 10.75" chest small.  Only the dolls made after 2015 could wear them.  Also, the sleeves on the dinosaur shirt barely go over the hands.  I like the shirts, but the issue of fit is definitely making me not want to buy new doll clothes from AG unless I take a doll to the store, try it on the doll in-store after purchase, and return what doesn't fit immediately.  Luckily, I can also just sew my own.

And now back to the dolls...

Sam is working on ...something... involving programing a tiny microcontroller.  Turns out, if you have a tiny Adafruit Gemma microcontroller board, you can kind-of-sort-of attach it to an AG laptop.  And Sam has her programming buddy, LEGO Margaret Hamilton, to help her debug.  We do not yet have a doll-sized stack of Apollo guidance module control code.  The human might have balked at printing out 4500 sheets of doll-sized paper for it (and that's the doll-scale model).

Nellie and Cauth have done that thing of making LEGO landmines all over the floor.  They'll finish the Women of NASA LEGO set eventually, we think.  And then it will be time to start the LEGO BB8.  We desperately need to go along with our R2 unit.  It's smaller, so we're sure we can find a place for it here somewhere.

Yes, that is a sonic screwdriver.  No, you may not have it.

And finally, a cute little craft for those last minute Easter baskets or because someone needs more posters in their room:  the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's vintage space tourism posters.  The Mars poster is the same one in Luciana's Mars Habitat.  There's 20 different posters in all.  Print them on lightweight cardstock for the best effect.

JPL Space Tourism Posters

Newbery Book Reviews: The Giver

Kana here.  We have, over the course of the year, built up a quite the library.  And as it turns out, we haven't actually shown off most of our books yet.  Over the summer, the human found a few stashes of digitized books, and we got ourselves a rather modern library (or rather, late 90s vintage, courtesy of the human's nostalgia).

This week's book collection is the Giver Quartet by Lois Lowry (she of 'Number the Stars', which the human remembers reading way back in 4th grade).

The internet can provide much better summaries (and book reports) than we can, but suffice to say, 'The Giver' is a good introduction of dystopia for those too young for Orwell's '1984'.  Jonas's world seems to work so well.  And then you learn over the course of the book just how things work.

'Gathering Blue' and 'Messenger' expand the world, and the cliffhanger ending to 'The Giver' is finally explained.  The weird magic and how certain people have certain gifts is never explained.  Deus ex machina it is.

The last book, 'Son', came out in 2012 and feels like it's meant for the generation who grew up reading 'The Giver' in elementary school.  The description of C-section and post-partum depression makes much more sense to the generation who'd be of child-rearing age about now.

And now, as always, your chance to expand your library (think of it as the winter reading special):

The Giver

Instructions

Lily's Magical Marketplace

Lily here.  So we're all packing for the annual Great Summer Adventure (tm) in which the humans drive up to Maine for a weekend and pretend they're living in the Middle Ages.  And this time, the four of us are getting drafted to be the booth models.

But first, we set up a little fair of our own, to show off all the things that will be on display this weekend.

First there's the food.  It's not a fair without food.

We've got bread and cheese and sausage and pickles and eggs and gingerbread and pasties.  The pasties even come in two flavors, and they definitely look good enough to eat.  All the food was made with polymer clay, except the display tower in the back.  Those are erasers on the Wellie Wisher snack stand that the human repainted.

Then there's my magical emporium booth stocked with potions and wands and potions ingredients.  And journals and pens to take notes on potion brewing.  I have a little workstation set up so I can brew things on demand.  

Polymer clay wands

44 bottles of various potions ingredients, made from little glass vials and scraps of floral arrangments

The open book is actually a miniature version of the Voynich manuscript.  No one really knows what it says, but there's a theory that it's a New World herbal written in an extinct language.  So I'm using it as one.

Obligatory photobomb

Young Ladies of Leisure

It's not very often we have a leisurely day around here.  But today Nellie and I spent a lovely morning in the parlor.  There was a breakfast buffet laid out on the sideboard, and new books in the window seat.  As is traditional for a proper breakfast, there was bread, pastries, fruit, sausages, bacon, and eggs.  None of that cold instant cereal.  We started breakfast off with a yogurt parfait, croissants, and cups of tea.

After breakfast, I worked on finishing some letters that I'd been putting off for too long.  Nellie, lucky duck, got to start reading novels.  (So Lord of the Rings didn't exist in 1906.  We took some liberties with time travel or whatnot.)

Card games are definitely ladylike.

And then we played Set.  If you've never played before, there's a deck of 81 cards.  Each card has four attributes: color, shape, shading, and number.  A 'set' is three cards where every attribute is the same or every attribute is different.  You deal out 12 cards, and cards get replaced as sets are found.  So in the first layout, the set (and I was the one called it) is '3 blank red diamonds, 3 shaded green squiggles, and 3 solid purple ovals'.  And you call a 'set' by yelling 'SET!' and grabbing for the cards as fast as you can before someone gets them.

Nellie: SET again!
Sam:  Scourge

Sam:  SET!
Nellie:  Scourge.

Sam:  Do you see a set?
Nellie:  No.  Do we need more cards?
Sam:  Wait, no.  SET!

Games get heated sometimes.  But we're technically young ladies, so we're civil.  Sort of.  It's way more fun when there's six or seven players.  It is also traditional to call the other players a scourge if they get any sets at all.

Interjection from Nellie:  'The human doesn't want to referee that...'

Sam:  OK, who won this time?
Nellie:  Scourge.

Nellie:  Yay!  I have more sets!
Sam:  Scourge.

If you want to play the game at home, here's the printables for a doll-sized SET deck of your very own.  It comes with box too so you don't have cards everywhere.  Just print it out double sided on cardstock.

SET deck

Our furry footman

And he didn't even knock anything over.