Henry has no school this week, so we went down to Balboa Park this afternoon for a treat. I love Balboa Park. My parents used to take us there sometimes, and we’d spend the whole day wandering around, looking at the gardens and visiting a museum or two. It’s a very happy, special place for me.
Today the Aerospace and Automotive museums were open for free! I love looking at the beautiful old cars. Here I am with an International Harvester Model A Auto-Wagon, which has bolt-in back seats so it can be used for hauling things around the farm or to take the family to church:
And here’s Henry with the DeLorean:
When we were finished drooling over the cars, we went through the Aerospace Museum. I like the WWI gallery best, and the spacecraft of course! Here’s Henry with the Apollo 9 Command Module:
A short, entertaining, interesting video about each of the chemical elements, plus lots of videos on various molecules and other interesting stuff. (Hit the “Extra Videos” link).
Here, for example, is a video in which one scientist makes a birthday cake in the lab, to celebrate one year of posting their videos, while the main scientist explains all the interesting chemical reactions that go into creating a cake!
I’m pretty worn out now, but I felt well enough this morning to go on an outing with Henry. We went to the MOPA in Balboa Park and looked at the beautiful photos, and then walked through the Botanical Building, and then through the Timken Gallery. I love the Timken especially much; I’ve been visiting it ever since I was a little kid and I just love to say hi to my favorite paintings. And then Henry treated me to lunch at In-N-Out!
Boy among the plants:
Botanical Building seen through the fancy railing at the Timken:
Tuesday was Henry’s school performance of The Wiz! Henry played the Tinman, and he was just wonderful, singing and dancing and acting and everything! I was so proud! The whole cast did just great. Henry’s good friends played all the lead roles, and you could tell they were all having a lot of fun together. Tawni was the Wiz, Natalia was Dorothy (she was terribly ill with a fever and sore throat, poor thing), Sam was the Lion and Sierra was the Scarecrow. I forgot to take my camera, but I hope to get some photos from *someone* eventually… until then, here’s a photo of Henry in costume. We decorated the shoes and pants with chrome duct tape, the hat was a dollar at Target right before New Year’s Eve, and he has a glittery shirt on under the jacket. For the performance he skipped the hat but had really great make-up — silver face paint and dark lips and a drawn-on jaw hinge.
I’ve been in love with Dover Publications since I was a little kid. The coloring books! The cheap reprints of classics! The antique needlework guides! The cut-and-makes! The paper dolls, oh, the paper dolls! I just found out that Dover has an online sampler service. Just give them your email address, and every week you get a link to a webpage full of sample book pages to download and print out. Today I got two coloring pages, one from a stained glass coloring book and another from “Art Masterpieces to Color”. If I had a color printer, I could have printed out a page of post-impressionist postcards and a page of fruit-crate labels. And if I liked Tom Tierney I could have printed a page of one of his paper doll books. There are also pages from a book of poetry, a book of mazes, a book of butterfly crafts, etc., etc.
LibriVox’s full-cast reading of The Scarecrow of Oz is complete and ready for download! As usual, our recording is public domain, free and legal to download and share, of course. Every character is read by a different voice, by readers all around the world, and the narration is done by still more readers. Scott Sherris coordinated this massive project and did all the pasting-together of parts, a huge job. I did a few chapters of narration, and Henry took part as Button-Bright. Hint: Chapter 8 is Button-Bright’s first appearance ;-)
Feeling much, much better today! I still have The Cough, and probably will for some time, but I had enough energy to do the grocery shopping today and I didn’t get a headache in the afternoon, YAY!
Henry had his weekly private Kung Fu lesson this afternoon, and I got a few photos of him and his teacher, Miss Edwards. Here’s one:
He loves Kung Fu! He’s at a group class right now. His school lets him attend as many group classes as he wants, plus there’s a special group class just for his level once a week.
Henry baked a cheesecake today. We’re going to try it out when he gets home :)
edit: Henry’s cheesecake was delicious. The three of us ate half of it in one night, and he took the other half to share with his dad!
