Cub Scout Trout Fishing Expedition

Yesterday we went on our second Cub Scout fishing trip to Two Rivers state rec area. The park has a stocked trout pond that gives the kids a guaranteed chance to catch some fish. The only problem is that it is catch and eat - not catch and release like we normally do with bluegills. The boys enjoyed catching some fish, but they still have no interest in eating them. The cat, dog, and I ended up eating the four trout. I tried cooking them on the grill - not bad.

The in the video, GP reels in a keeper and then JP lands a whopper with her bare hands. The audio is bad - JP's big concern is the size of the trout's teeth. The other scout mom and I lend her words of encouragement.

It Did Not Come Out!

GP has had a loose tooth for the last two months. Last week he finally put together enough courage to yank out the wiggly thing. His plan: attach the tooth to a dart and shoot the dart out of a gun. We tried and tried, but the floss we used to secure the tooth kept coming off the tapered tooth. One time it held on the tooth but came off the dart. On the final try it stayed attached but lacked the energy required to separate tooth from boy.



A few days later, the tooth fell out during the bus ride home from school.

Nebraska as Art

When Grampa was here last time, he said that he had read a story in National Geographic about a meteor crater here in Nebraska. It's called Merna Crater and is located in Custer County right next to BFE. It looks like it's probably not an actual crater, just a nice round depression.

Anyway, one thing led to another and I ended up downloading digital elevation models (huge text files) of the state from UNL and wrote a LabView program to process the data into images. I posted Adams thru Gage Counties in a web album. I used different colormaps to represent elevations. In the image above, blue is the highest and black is the lowest. Some of the county images could pass for art.

Carolina Bays in Nebraksa: Before moving to Nebraska, I was entertaining thoughts of moving to South Carolina and working for a big forklift company. While doing research on S. Carolina, I found some information on the Carolina Bays, some oval depressions that line the east coast. They are called bays because many of them are filled with Bay trees. There's quite a bit of internet stuff out there about them and some believe that they are impact craters from a big slushy comet, as their central axes all sort of point to a central origin. It makes for spectacular sci-fi reading.

When I started browsing through my first attempts at visualizing the DEM's, I was shocked to see some large oval depressions in some of the counties. Turns out that these are the same as the Carolina Bays, but located here on the prairie in Nebraska. Most lie south of the current Platte River and are oriented perpendicular to the continuous winds. Filmore and Clay counties are full of them.

New Mower

This week I brought home an old prototype mower to tinker with. We were going to scrap it, and I figured that it might be nice to get some use out of it instead. It was barely running when I took it home, and after a couple hours of working on it it still barely ran. My diagnosis is that the camshaft gear jumped a tooth - I need to tear it down to be sure, but that is for another day. Fortunately, we had another engine with only 400 hours on it at work. It only took an hour to swap engines, and another hour to figure out how to route the belts on the front of the engine. It has a serpentine hydro drive belt and twin double-sided v-belts for the PTO and blower. Once the belts were routed the engine fired up first time and we were cutting grass.



The boys are wanting like crazy to drive the thing, but I have visions of them driving straight into a basement window well. JP did very well and mowed the entire back yard with an ear-to-ear grin.

Today we went to Campell's Nursery which was closed for a year due to road construction. I think they are making up for the lost revenues with their prices. We bought and installed two yellow shrub roses on the back of the house. Here in Lincoln, roses grow like weeds and we are excited about having some nice flowers around the house.

This morning I finished off staining the Rainbow. It was a year overdue due to our move. It's amazing what a gallon of waterseal can do for weathered wood. Out neighbor got in the spirit and gave his swingset a coat as well.

Hobbytown Model Contest

This morning we ran over to Hobbytown to check out their model contest. I thought that the contest started at 10am, but when we got there at 10:30, there were barely any entries, so we decided to enter. We raced home and CP speed-built his first glue-together plastic model - a 1/72nd scale Corsair. Alex from next door brought over a Junkers Ju-88 bomber that he and his dad had worked on and was 90% complete. GP helped CP and Alex paint their models.

Alex's bomber had a billion teeny tiny parts that I could barely hold, much less cut them free of the sprues undamaged. We glued on most of the pieces, but skipped the super-tiny parts like the front radio antennas. We quickly put on a few decals (called "detals" by CP and "decoys" by Alex) and then raced over to hobbytown to enter by 1:00 pm.

I expected to see a lot more models at hobbytown than there were, but the quality of those there made up for quantity. There were several planes that were detailed down to the seatbelt stiching and instrument panel gages. I knew we didn't have a chance, but I was promoting the contest as a good family activity and a fun way for the kids to expand their obsession with WW-II planes.
Alex had to leave for his piano lesson, but we stuck around to watch the judging. During our wait, GP exploded a squishy juice ball all over himself with bright pink juice. He cried and cried because I had told him the entire way to the store that morning that he (and the others) were to touch NOTHING in the store. We waited and waited and finally went home to recharge with a snack.

We returned to Hobbytown at 3:00, thinking the contest was over, to collect our planes. Wrong. The judge was still judging. Finally at 3:30 he started laying out ribbons. All day we had been coaching the overly confident boys and telling them that they probably would not win, as they were up against some nice models by 15-year olds in the Junior category.

We watched the judge place a red 2nd place ribbon next to Alex's bomber. He was ecstatic! CP was happy for him, until he realized that there was no ribbon next to his Corsair. After all the 2nd place ribbons, the judge started with the 1st place ribbons. We watched in awe as he put one next to CP's plane. I was so happy for CP! Now Alex was bummed that he didn't win a blue ribbon. I was just fired up that they both got ribbons. The judge had a big stack of ribbons and split the junior category into cars and planes. Very niiice. He also split the adult planes into plastic and balsa, which gave me a 1st place ribbon as the only entry in the balsa category with my Me-109! We entered 3 planes and came home with 3 ribbons!

What a day! It's now 8:30 pm and the boys are still playing out some dogfight over the Pacific which will resume promptly at 6:00 am tomorrow morning.

Spitfire

Last night we finished up the latest plane in our WW-II airforce: the Supermarine Spifire Mk-II. I built this one sans landing gear, machine guns, and antennas. Instead of tissue paper, I used sheets of balsa wood. I am anxious to see if it lasts longer than the others.
We have continuous air battles raging throughout the house. Right now the combatants are debating the proper sound to make for the machine guns on the Spitfire. Last night we watched "Dogfight" and all of us were very engaged. The show was about the battle of Leyte and how we took out the Japanese super-battleship, the Yamato, which was featured on Nova this last week. Very Exciting!

Omaha Zoo w/ G & G

Gramma & Grampa stopped by on their latest trans-continental journey. We had a fun time going to the Omaha Zoo. After almost two years of going to the zoo, we finally made it through the cat house.

Wow! It looks just like St. George.

Piano Lessons

The boys are excited about their piano lessons. I promised them that they could get any instruments they want, but they have to learn the piano first. GP wants to play drums, and CP wants to buy a "guitar solo."