Elizabeth's Blessing Day

Our sweet little girl was blessed at the beginning of this month. All of our immediate family was able to attend, plus some extended. We were so glad the weather was good enough for travel. Thanks for all of your support. (Pictures are of Elizabeth and Emily's family. We didn't get a picture with Peter's family--though we should...hint, hint.)

Did I Mention I Like Trains?

Here are some videos of the latest train fun.

What I Did Over Christmas Break

What did I do? I wasted my time!! Ok, maybe not, but I sure had a lot of other plans for this three week break with no work or school.

So here is the progression of my ginger bread model construction.

First I designed all the electrical stuff, here is a schematic of what I built.



Then I took Zach's ball and used it as a paper mashe frame.



Then once the ball had hardened, I drained the air out of the ball(yes Zach's ball made it out safely), cut the paper in half and wired in all of the lights.









Once that was done, I duct taped the two halves back together and began making gingerbread. In efforts match as closely as possible the pentakis dodecahedron pattern that spaceship earth is...



we decided to make three isosceles triangles that when put together would make the equilateral triangle. So after some fun math and trig, I figured out how to cut a block of ginger bread in order to get the maximum number of triangles without wasting any space.



After cooking the gingerbread, and letting it harden. I needed to combine the three isosceles triangles together, this was a bit challenging because they also needed to be slightly pyramidal in shape, so we used some play dough molds to hold them in this shape while we hot glued them together.



Once I had made a bunch of these, I began attaching them to the ball, (I also made some legs during the cooking process. It was important to have six legs, in pairs, because the real one is supported by six pylons driven 120 feet into the ground.)






Then, once the triangles were on, and the ball was covered, with some fudging. I began to fill in the cracks with frosting



By this time, it was New Years Eve and we ran out of eggs, so we couldn't finish the frosting portion. So on New Years, we took it to the family party and finished it up there. There, Em built Mickey's hand and wand.

Here is the final product, yes the lights do not exist on the real thing, but I had to make it nerdy somehow :-)



Here are some videos of some of the different blinking light combinations that I programed onto it, and yes, it's still programmable, there is a jack in one of the legs that I can connect my computer to access the micro controller that does all of the light blinking. :-)