Books for little geeks

Or rather, books from geeks, GeekDads to be specific.
Today Michael Harrison at GeekDad has a post about Laura’s new b00kn3rd.com blog [it took me a while to figure out that "book nerd" is in there, but then I'm still woozy from my breakfast of waffles, whipped cream, and strawberries] and her post on rare children’s [...]

What we’ve been up to

Building a new open-front pole shed.
Tom and his helper, his father, and the boys (Laura is otherwise engaged, halter-breaking Benny) have done this bit in the past week. Daniel especially likes what I think of as the “high wire” work. I’ll stay down on the ground with my camera, and the [...]

Happy Mother’s Day

from all the mamas and their offspring at Farm School!
Callie the calico cat and some of her kittens,

Laura’s 4H cow-calf pair, Bunny and Benny,

Oreo the Speckle Park calf,

Poetry Friday: Mushrooms

It’s still Friday around here, for another two hours and 50 minutes, so technically I’m not late. It’s been a busy week, with swim club starting (requiring us to be in town four afternoons a week), an art lesson (we had just about forgotten what the art teacher looked like), and a make-up singing [...]

The latest from the tar sands

From The Edmonton Sun, May 5, 2008:
Despite a public apology from Syncrude following the deaths of 500 ducks in one of the oil giant’s tailing ponds near Fort McMurray, an investigation by the province will continue, Premier Ed Stelmach said yesterday.
“I certainly thank them for the apology they gave the print media, but we will [...]

It occurs to me

that I didn’t post any “before” window project photos. Here are a few before and during shots.
Before, inside (with apologies for the crummy quality):

Before, inside, with Davy:

Before, outside:

During, just after they removed the old window, and the wall:

During, with the new build-out framing:

During, getting ready to install the windows with some very brief snow [...]

Hopefully

“To plant a seed is a hopeful deed.”
– unknown gardener
It didn’t take more than a week, living with the new enormous south-facing window in the master bedroom, to realize that what I had was not a large sunny window seat but the perfect seed-starting greenhouse. I planted some seeds in early April — from [...]

Water water everywhere…

When Tom and I heard the news earlier this week about the hundreds of ducks killed earlier this week when they landed on a Syncrude tailings “pond”, we both immediately thought of an article we had read late last year in albertaviews magazine; the article was “The Ponds” by the Calgary investigative journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, [...]

Make your own school

Late but interesting: I didn’t see this until today, when it was already too late, from Gever Tulley’s blog:
Just a quick note to say that I’ll be speaking and answering questions on Thursday, May 1st at the Maker Day event before the Maker Faire and then again on Saturday, May 3rd, the first day of [...]

Do it Yourself Science

Via Boing Boing and Pharyngula, word of a new, subversive (that’s PZ’s term) chemistry book, just out this week from the Make Magazine folks:

Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture by Robert Bruce Thompson, part of O’Reilly Media’s DIY Science series.
Thompson is also the author, along with his wife Barbara Fritchman [...]

Off to see the wizard, if they can get their heads out of the (tar) sands

I’m writing about the duck deaths at the Syncrude tailings pit earlier this week not because I’ve dug out any news of my own, or have any noteworth comments, but because I’d like to help spread the news of this incident in particular and the tar sands in general beyond Alberta’s borders, especially to the [...]

Ducks in the coalmine

(illustration from the Environmental Defence website)
This past Monday, April 28, about 500 migrating ducks drowned after landing on a man-made tailings “pond” (officially, the Aurora Settling Basin), filled not with water but with toxic waste sludge from the Syncrude tar sands (the province of Alberta, Syncrude, and the other mining corporations prefer the tidier [...]