OmegaMom

Dudes.  What is with our culture?!  Seriously.  Isn’t it good enough to be invited to participate in the state science fair?  Does every damned thing kids participate in require that every tender ego be protected from negative vibes?

All the kids at the State Science Fair got “participant” ribbons and a certificate.

Ah, well, it’s all for the chiiiiillllldrrrruuuuunnnn.  We must spare them any and all psychic harm, dontchaknow?

Bah.

That said…OmegaDotter came home with an official second-place ribbon, and we’re as pleased as punch with that.

The venue was a brand-new middle school in Big City.  A really pretty brand-new school.  With two art studios!  And a dance studio!  And an atrium filled with dangling glass mosaics in rainbow colors!  Holy cow, it looked like the set from High School Musical–there were balconies and swathes of glass and the principal’s office was a two-story high-ceilinged affair!  Man, we felt like we were in Swank City while we were there.

Friday evening was filled with standing in lines.  There was the line to check in to get a project number.  There was the “media release” line.  There was the line for the free T-shirt.  There was the line to pay for registration.  There was the line for the judging information and time selection for judging (for elementary students–older students had to be there for a full four hours).  There was the line for the FAQs (really–why on earth didn’t they just hand it out with the project number?!).  There was the line for the Safety Check, which in essence said that if you brought anything that could possibly, in any way, harm someone by giving them a boo-boo, it was out.  THEN, when all those lines were visited (older students also had the line-to-submit-abstracts and the line-for-human-research-protocol-checks), then you could visit the line where they told you where to put the project.

But even with all the lines, it only took us an hour.  Then we went off to dinner at a local Korean restaurant, overate, and went home, to return again this a.m.

These are the hanging mosaics at Very Bright Shiny New Middle School:

This was part of the scene in the gymnasium where the exhibits were displayed:

OmegaDotter talking with the judge.  We had walked her through various questions and answers beforehand, but were not allowed to be anywhere near her during the judging.  The gymnasium had an upper-level track around the periphery, so we went up there and spied from above.  Yes, it’s a bad picture; I zoomed too far and things pixilated.

Madame Scientista posing in front of her project:

One of the middle schoolers on the other side of the gymnasium also had a dissolving-egg-shells project; theirs was much more complex and involved measuring the thickness of the egg shells using calipers after four days of immersion, and they used Sprite instead of Dr Pepper and Pepsi.  The dotter was very interested in seeing their project, and they had to ask her if she bounced the nekkid eggs–which, of course, we had done.

Then we had five hours to kill before we could pick up the projects, so we drove down the coast of the inlet to Ski Resort Town, which we had never visited before.  I was astonished at how much snow they got there; OmegaDad kept telling me that this was the Rain Shadow Effect In Action.  Thank you very much, Herr Professor My Love!

We were intrigued by the effect of tides on ice in the inlet; there were many small iceberg-lets stranded on the mudflats at high tide, and the ice was not a solid sheet, but carved into canyons and mesas by the action of the tides (we assume).  Nothing like the ice on Lake Michigan in winter, which I remember very distinctly as a solid mass, with excellent frozen wave action on the edges (no waves in the inlet, so none of that here).

As we drove back, there was this large grey cloud to our left.  OmegaDad and I kept eyeing it, and we finally decided it must be an ash cloud from the volcano.  Note the brownish tinge to the bottom of the cloud layer at the top of the image below:

When we arrived home and checked the Alaska Volcano Observatory, sure enough, there had been yet another eruption (another day, another eruption; this is becoming almost routine by now), with an ash fall advisory in Big City.  Another eruption occurred after we got home, and this time the ash fall advisory is right here in Suburban Alaska.  So OmegaDad is outside taping up the cracks around the chicken coop.  Ah, life in Alaska…

As an aside:  last year, there were pictures of way kewl lightning around the eruption of Chaiten volcano in Chile.  Tonight, I am able to provide links to similar pictures of our very own volcano!

Oh, and greetings to any Mudflatters who are visiting.  Look around, kick the tires, see if you want to stay a while!