Daddy update

Jason reporting. I've been working like a dog, so Jeanne's been doing the heavy lifting on posting to the blog - now it's my turn.

I took a business trip (drive) to Colorado Springs this past week to visit an air force and army base to meet with their job outplacement people to talk about how our clients can recruit transitioning military personnel. On that trip, I must have picked up a bug, because I've been having major stomach issues - probably not helped by the stress of how busy I've been at work. Earlier in the week I had promised Logan I would take him to the Denver Science Museum on Saturday - just the two of us for "Logan and Daddy day". Despite feeling pretty bad, I didn't want to break Logan's heart by telling him we couldn't go, so I sucked it up and we drove the 45 minutes into Denver to visit the museum.

I knew within 60 seconds of walking in that we would have a good day. Logan has been obsessed with the robotic Mars rovers since seeing them on Little Einsteins a few months ago. Well, right inside the door to the museum they had life sized models of the two Mars rovers on loan from JPL and Logan was MESMERIZED.

We ended up spending about 3 hours at the Museum, which is just an amazing place full of hands-on exhibits and demonstrations for the kids. There was a cool fan table where kids could explore how different scarves and parachutes would fly up in the air current.

Logan was particularly fascinated by a display of vacuum. In a demonstration of why we have to wear space suits in space and on Mars, a volunteer put a marshmallow cookie into a vacuum tube and pumped out all the air, causing the marshmallow to basically explode.

By the end of the day, Logan was pooped and crashed for a nap in the car on the way home.

I've been working pretty much around the clock, so the challenge of amusing the kids has fallen on Jeanne and she's been doing a great job - helping Logan press flowers and teaching Zach about the beauty of Sushi.

Also, Zach is getting big enough to start pulling his weight around here - Jeanne has shown him how to help her unload the dishwasher and he is a great little helper. Now we just need to teach him the difference between clean and dirty dishes so he doesn't "help" by unloading the dirty dishes!

That's about it - love to all.

Jason

Family Green Report

Composter: so far, so good - no funky smells, either from the kitchen scrap bucket (my biggest worry) or from the big composter itself. I haven't brought myself to look inside since we started adding kitchen scraps though. Yikes.

Compact Fluorescent Bulbs: We've replaced all of our eight kitchen spotlights and our 14 basement can lights (at 65 watts each) with 16-watt, dimmable CF bulbs. They take a little getting used to - although they're warm-ish, soft white, they are still just slightly cooler in color than the incandescents. Also, they take a minute or so to warm up, so when you first turn on the lights they are very dim and uninviting, but within 60 seconds or so they reach full luminescence and are really quite an acceptable substitute. At $15 a pop they were quite an investment, but supposedly they last for five years or so. We'll see. We have about a zillion other recessed lights in the house so we'll be making it a project to eventually replace all or most of them. Incidnentally, if you're in the market for these (dimmable CF are a little tough to find) we bought the NEPTUN-R30-16W-Dimmable reflector bulbs from www.1000bulbs.com

May 15th is planting day!

Very interesting...I stopped by the local hardware store today because Zach and I had a few minutes to kill while waiting to pick Logan up from school and I thought Zach might enjoy looking at the nursery plants. Unlike in California, when there is never real danger of a hard frost, the nursery plants here are labeled as to their cold hardiness (e.g. many of their pansies are hardened to 20 degrees) and there was a big sign basically saying "buyer beware...last frost date is May 15 so you're taking your chances if you buy and plant frost-tender plants before then." What a nice service - I guess I don't need to buy a Farmer's Almanac after all.

Zach was a little TOO interested in the flowers, by the way, so we had to move on before he did any damage. But I'm planning a trip to the nursery in two weeks to pick up some goodies to add to my garden.