As you can see from this picture The snow is almost exactly as deep as the top of the auger-housing.

Immediately, at 9:30 AM,  I suited up and headed out to snow blow the drive and the sidewalk.

The driveway is not small, but not huge either. Our old driveway is much smaller, but there was no place to put a snow-blower or the car.

In this picture, you can see that the snow is about four inches deeper than the input on the auger. You can see that the snow doesn’t cling to my snow-pants, which have a tight nylon weave unlike my Carhartt Jacket and gloves which get permeated with snow.

I’m definitely going to get out there before the snow gets that high again. It took me about 2.5 hours to run the snow blower. So far the gift of a day has not arrived, but on the bright side, we’re still ahead of the snow, as far as the driveway is concerned.

Rest of Today

Visibilities often below 1/4 of a mile in blowing and drifting snow. Snow heavy at times with a new snow accumulation 3 to 4 inches. Highs around 28. North wind 15 to 25 mph with gusts increasing to 35 mph. Near the border…north wind 40 mph.

Tonight

Visibilities often below 1/4 of a mile in blowing and drifting snow through early this evening. Snow heavy at times with a new snow accumulation 2 to 3 inches before tapering off this evening. Lows around 20…ranging to around 8 above near the border. Northwest wind 20 to 30 mph with gusts to 45 mph.

Thursday

Partly cloudy. Windy. Slight chance of snow in the morning. Highs around 20. North wind 15 to 30 mph with gusts to around 40 mph.

Thursday Night

Partly cloudy. Colder. Lows zero to 8 above zero. North wind 15 to 25 mph. Wind chill to 20 below.

Friday

Partly cloudy. Highs 11 to 17. Northeast wind 10 to 20 mph. Wind chill to 20 below.

Friday Night through Saturday Night

Partly cloudy. Lows 3 to 10. Highs 13 to 17.

Sunday

Cloudy. Chance of snow. Highs around 25.

The boys build a fort this morning.

The wood-stack tries to stay dry under the tarp.

The snow hangs off the roof over the kitchen window.

The day-stack of wood on the porch, nice and dry under the roof, with mixed remains of Mark’s hatchet work to make kindling.

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The view from the porch: we can’t even see the water, due to the snowfall.

Snow fort construction.

Heavily snow-laden trees tower over the 7.5 cord wood-shed.

When she poured this pile of pink, purple, and red clothes onto the bed for folding, I just had to cheer for them:

“Go little baby pink clothes! Go!”

In my estimation, these pink clothes are the definite under-dog in the race to which set of clothes will be selected to be on the starting team when the time comes. We already have three boys and the blue, brown, and green clothes are sitting confidently on the shelf.

It’s not that I wouldn’t be happy with another boy. We love our boys. But it would be nice if Holly had a girl, I think.

What do you think?

He then made the fairly straight forward mistake of squeezing the filler handle to maximum flow and then removing the nozzle from the tank fill tube. Of course the safety flapper in the tank fill tube on the car activated instantly sealing off the tank, causing a huge spraying gush of unleaded gasoline to splash right into his eyes, nose, face, neck, and body, drenching his hair, shirt, and pants with 87 octane. This lead to a great deal of loud screaming, flailing, and panicking amongst all present. It was a huge mess, unparalleled in my experience at any gas station.

We got out a water bottle which quickly ran dry, and held his head back to rinse the eyes, of course he was yelling and thrashing about and I was trying to hold him still so I could pour water on his eyes. He was trying hard to close them. Then I was using both hands to scoop the water out of the courtesy windshield washer fluid station, there on the fuel island to splash it on his face. There’s gas on Mark, on me and on the ground. He’s screaming and crying. I’m thinking, parenting is not for the weak of heart.

Finally Holly threw a towel down on the car seat for Mark to sit on and we raced home and put him in the tub. Two hours later as he went to sleep he was complaining he could still smell the gas, and was pretty sad because he wasn’t going to have any friends any more, since he stank.

Of course Holly looked at the bright side: at least nobody caught fire! We could have had an explosion and killed everybody. It’s a good thing we don’t smoke…

Holly has been doing summer school with the boys at the dinner table each morning. all summer with some books she got.

Mark is doing the third grade book, Luke is doing the Kindergarten book, and John Caleb is doing a pre-school book. This morning Holly was teaching our Mark about proper nouns and how they should always be capitalized. “Proper nouns are things like the Grand Canyon, Haines, and names like Mark, or Luke.” And Luke cheerfully chimed in, “Or things like Fat Watermelon.”

I was making biscuits.

In the second two videos, the calculus students present their equations and graphs of their results to the class.

To gather your own data from the videos, make a table of values, then start in!

Stove Data

Newton’s Law of Cooling states that the rate of change in the temperature of an object is proportional to the difference between the object’s temperature and the temperature of the surrounding medium. The differential equation that arises from this is: y’ = k(Y-t)

Laser Printer

This is a short video and the paper drops from 176 degrees to 75.5 degrees in about 2 minutes.

Mug Data Video

Video is spliced together from 4 videos and is quite long. One would want to pick an interval to use like, say 5 minutes. (very long: 56 minutes!) Turns out, a cup of water takes much longer to cool down than a piece of paper.

Chris & Blake do a rap up. The battery on the camera died before the end.

Chris and Blake do a find job in this video. Unfortunately, the battery died before the end of their presentation.

Hunter and Abby do their presentation.

Abby and Hunter have a nice wrap-up here.

Basically, they are vending machines that require a credit card to rent a video and all rentals are $0.99 per day. If you turn the video in by 9 PM the next day, you are only charged $0.99 for the rental, if you fail to return the video by 9 PM, your card is charged an additional $0.99 until a maximum of 25 days, at which time, the fees stop, and you have in essence purchased the video. 

You typically see these Red Box machines at the entryways to Wal-Mart stores or QFCs, or other retailers that have a large volume of foot traffic. You can rent a maximum of five videos at a time. When you rent or return a video, a confirmation is automatically sent to your email address so you can make sure that their records agree with yours.\

As seen below, the disc comes in a little plastic protective case. What makes all of this possible, is that the case has gaps in it that allow a reader inside the machine to identify the DVDs individually.

In the Seattle area, there are hundreds of these vending machines, and you can rent a video from any one of them, and you can return the video to any one of them as well. To simplify things, you can search them online to find out which machines have which videos plus you can reserve a video and rest assured that it will be available when you show up to the machine.

At one store, a machine was broken down and I got to peak inside at the inner workings. There is a large carousel inside that spins as well as an arm that disperses and retrieves the videos.

The coolest thing about the Red Boxes is that they have all the latest releases available for a $1.00. Every week, the new releases come out and, if you live near one, you can get them in a heart-beat.

If you’ve used Netflix, you’re familiar with searching an online video data base to pick your favorite movies. Red Box has a similar website that doesn’t use ratings, favorites, or queues, but is nevertheless easy to use and fun to peruse.

On the website, there are vague instructions on how to purchase a Red Box franchise, but I don’t think I have time for that, nor does Haines have the population base to properly support one.

On the one hand, it’s sad to see all the Blockbuster Video and Hollywood Video shops with lights out and For Lease signs all over them, but on the other hand, how do you compete with $1 rentals? I think some places continue to rent videos: Safeway has its own rentals, and other convenience shops will probably always have their own rentals.

We took a bunch of pictures like this one on the hippopotamus. Each of varying degrees of success.

The Lion was in top form. Posing, growling, and otherwise strutting his stuff.

The PBJ was supplemented by Juice boxes, nuts, cookies, and cheddar bunnies.

The bears were a favorite too, Although I missed the one swimming in the water by just a few moments.

The Jaguar was in top form, pacing around all over the pace, it took me ten tries to get this shot due to the shutter-lag and relatively low fosuing speed on my pany point-n-shoot. I shot a bunch of video but we can’t get it to upload on the road.

At the dead-end on the end of Myra’s Street, there is an adjustable height basketball goal that the boys like to play at. We closed off the day by going there.

Next we’re off to visit the Scotts in Sequim.

Mark and Luke have been having fun playing Battleship, and they’ve convinced J.C. to carry the game in his backpack. He’s happy to do it. So that he can be one of the big-boys.

There was a beautiful moonrise too, with the full moon huge on the horizon over the mountains, which show up ever so lightly, at perigee. The photo did not turn out too bad, considering it was from a point-n-shoot: Lumix DMC-ZS7, with a 12X Optical zoom and a 16x intelligent zoom—whatever that is.

We stayed at the Extended Stay Hotel, got to sleep at 10:30 and back up again at 5 AM.

Today, Mark and I sat over the wing and I got to explain the fundamentals of flight too him as we watched the wing: thrust drag, stabilizers, lift, gravity, rudder, jets, etc. It was really fun showing him what we could see from our first row seat above the wing.

We had lunch at the food court in Seattle. We all shared a mondo Burrito from Quedebas, or some such.

The we heard from Jack that Jessica was swimming in Time Trials at the all NW

Here’s the same picture zoomed out wide and flipped vertical. You can just make out the three adjacent 25m pools in this huge aqua center.

We go to the zoo tomorrow. And whereas it’s odd not to have my big  DSLR & lenses, it sure is nice not having to lug so much gear around.

I guess the most memorable part of the trip, so far,  was going through the security check point in Juneau.

Holly had given all the boys a pep talk about what we were going to have to do: stick together, empty pockets of metal, take off all our coats and take off our shoes and put them in the big plastic bins along with the bags, go one-by-one through the metal detector. And she even explained how they might get the magic wand if they made the machine go beep. The boys were nervous..

And the boys were serious.

Holly was leading the troop, I was taking up the rear.

We were taking off our coats, as we walked along the long table, and emptying our pockets. I took my eyes of Luke for just a second to see how the other line was progressing and felt my foot accidentally hit Luke’s heel. Down he went like a swirling baton, all his stuff went a clattering. His shoe came off under my foot. Bam, he hit the ground, just catching himself with his hands before he did a face-plant.

But the kid did not miss a beat.

He quickly reached down and pulled off his other shoe, grabbed his coat and backpack with his other hand and bounced back up with a smile holding both shoes in his two little shaky hands.

I wanted to give him a big hug.

But there wasn’t time. And my arms were full.

“Good job Snook (that’s his nick-name now). You bounced right back up.” I said, as I put my laptop bag under my arm so I could hold out the hand to take his shoes. I put his shoes in a tote and gave him ‘five-on-the-side’ and he turned and strode in his little boy-going-to-be-a-man-someday stride right to his spot in the queue for the metal detector.

Wow.

If I’d fallen down like that in the security line, I’d have been embarrassed and mortified. And I shudder to thing what some of the other people in line would have gone through, some were not so stable or nimble on their feet, and might have even been injured in a fall like that.

I can’t quite but it into words. But something but his actions show a level of sincerity and desire to do the right thing that really made me thankful for him and for people like him. People that do their best even when it doesn’t go right all the time.

He’s a hard working little guy.

Currently,  we still have a trickle of water and we’ve filled all the large containers in the house. I also went down to the boat and got a blue five-gallon container for drinking water—the type that is often used for roadside or canoe camping. Incidentally, the type that I think would really be nice for folks to have over in Japan during their displacement time right now.

To me, and I’ll admit I know almost nothing about the water system it looks like the flow of an 8-12 inch water line dumping into the ditch just southeast of the PO, and pouring into the block that holds the PO, the Eagle Foundation and Dusty Trials.

Our City water people and other employees are down there digging down into the frozen ground to investigate and repair the break situation.  These are well trained hard working folks that have a can-do attitude. So I would not be surprised if they figure out a way to stem the flow soon. One of my favorite things to photograph is people working hard to succeed in harsh conditions. I haven’t done much of that lately, thankfully, due to good planning and what seems like good infrastructure here in Haines.

Above ground, there is not much to see unless one looks in the ditch.

I just checked the water flow and it seems to have increased almost back to the normal level. Cool.

Mark was not feeling on-top-of-the-weather this morning, so Holly stayed with him during church and we swapped off for Sunday school.