Solar Eclipse

On August 21st there was a solar eclipse! We were not in the path of totality, like some of our family members, but it was still neat to see. Eclipse glasses were hard to find (the Walmart employees had never even heard of them) but I was able to get one free pair from our public library, and my mom had some from a friend and sent us one more. At the peak we had about 77% coverage. There will be a total eclipse in Texas in 2024 though, so next time we will get the good show!

Our view with and without the glasses. It was pretty cloudy, but there were enough sun breaks to get a glimpse of the eclipse

Sophie and I took turns with our pair of glasses since Dave took the other pair with him to campus

This guy had to be left inside since he couldn't be trusted

Video: Sophie checking out the eclipse

Another Day, Another Deal

Today Dave and I went to Holdman Studios at Thanksgiving Point to use another LivingSocial deal we bought a few months ago. Today's activity was making glass flowers!

We were surprised by a couple things:

First, the flowers we got to make were much bigger than what I was expecting. I thought we'd get to go home with a little tiny blossom, but the flower was the size of my palm and the stem was as long as my forearm.


Torching the stem of Dave's flower to make it round and smooth


Second, each flower only took about 7 minutes to make from start to finish. We got to choose two colors, and then using glass heated to 2250 degrees and a combination of spinning and pulling, a molten blob suddenly became a flower - it was very cool!

Our flowers have to cool slowly over night and we will probably pick them up early next week. While they were hot it was hard to tell what color they would become, but in the end mine should be green and Dave's should be blue. I can't wait to see what they look like!

Wordle

So you may have heard of "Wordle" (because I'm slow when it comes to cool things on the Internet), but if you haven't, head over here to check it out!

All you do is choose any piece of text and enter it into the box. Wordle then generates a "cloud" where words are size based on frequency of use. Then you can customize the colors, font, shape, etc... to make it look how you want.

I fed The Family: A Proclamation to the World into Wordle and love how it looks. Now go forth and create your own!