Lester Bangs

For a little while there, Suzanne was very interested in having bangs, but she was also scared. I get this!  When you have long hair, bangs are a huge commitment. Suzanne's best friend Anika had bangs. Maybe that's where this came from. In any event, Suzanne enjoyed simulating bangs (by pinning up her hair, etc.) but in the end did not cut her hair into bangs.

 

 For which I'm grateful.

Halloween Twenty Spook Teen

Halloween 2018 was the usual mix of incomprehensible costumes and rain. Suzanne went as Carmelita Spats*. Do you know who that is? Neither does anyone else! But she loved it, and I loved seeing her hair curled into ringlets, which Barb did three times -- a lot of effort on both Barb's and Suzanne's parts. Once for the Harvest Festival, once for a costume party, and once for ole Halloween itself.

Elizabeth, as you certainly can't tell from the photo, was The Monster Under the Bed. I had suggested that we suspend a toy bed above her head to give folks at least a fighting chance of understanding her costume. My suggestion was roundly rejected.

No matter. The kids had fun embodying their characters, and they came home with a huge haul of candy. This was the first year when I stayed home and greeted trick-or-treaters while the kids went out with Barb and Wendy. I kind of liked it, as I am a fuddy-duddy. I am trying to resist the transformation into fuddy-duddiness, but I'm 48 and it gets harder and harder with each passing year.

I really love how my kids consider Halloween costumes all about THEM. They don't care if YOU don't get it. They are having fun, and if part of that fun is confounding the adults, all the better.

That's Lily as a cardboard box, Elizabeth as The Monster Under the Bed, Suzanne as Carmelita Spats, and Kai as a black panther (not, I'm pretty sure, the superhero The Black Panther).

Elizabeth organizing and categorizing her candy. Probably a quarter of the haul was donated to the Candy Fairy, who ensures that the girls get candy at the next candy-oriented holiday.

*Carmelita Spats is a not-major character in the 13 books called A Series of Unfortunate Events. These books are Suzanne's Harry Potter. Carmelita is a villainous brat who refers to her enemies as "cakesniffers." Suzanne, who never dresses up -- she never wears a dress! -- seemed to have a lot of fun pretending to be the fancy-schmancy Miss Spats.

Born in Arizona/Moved to Babylonia

The Oregon of Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI -- a frankly inferior name to Syracuse's Museum of Science and Technology, or MOST, which my father named) has a traveling King Tut exhibit. We had the opportunity to preview the exhibit for cheap because Elizabeth is in the Talented & Gifted program at school. So, for two hours we had free access to the museum -- and access to the King Tut exhibit was only five bucks. Great deal!

Elizabeth and Suzanne had carefully laid out plans: one hour for the Tut, one hour for the other, more fun rooms where you can do things like be in a simulated earthquake, or make a stop-motion animation movie, or hold a walking stick insect.

So we stood in line for thirty minutes to get tickets to Tut. Then we stood in an antechamber (if you will) watching a video (that played three times in a loop) and waiting to get access to the Tut exhibit. Then we were funneled into a theater where we watched an eight minute video about Howard Carter (the guy who led the expedition that found the tomb). The movie was interesting!  But it was a movie.

After that, we moved through a series of tableaux that recreated Carter's discovery of the tomb of King Tut. It was pretty cool! Then we went upstairs to where all the artifacts were laid out for closer inspection. Also interesting and beautiful -- but 100% of what we looked at were reproductions. Even the mummy! It was a 3D printed model of the real King Tut mummy, based on a CAT scan or MRI or something. So... the whole experience was akin to going to a fake Louvre, and seeing a fake Mona Lisa and a fake David (which is not at the Louvre, but you get the idea).

The kids and I had a great time, until we realized we'd run out of time. As we were leaving the museum, we squeezed a few minutes of fun out of the animation studio, and had the close encounter with the walking stick bug, but both girls left a little crestfallen that their night at the museum hadn't amounted to more than looking at reproductions of Egyptian treasures.

This is what Howard Carter saw upon first entering the tomb. Although the front door was sealed, it appeared that tomb robbers had entered through a back way, probably shortly after the funeral. Which would explain the jumble of stuff. And who knows what went missing!

This shows the removal of the coffin from the sarcophagus, which was inside another sarcophagus, which was inside another sarcophagus, which was inside three layers of shrines -- the shrines were increasingly small gilded boxes nested inside each other like matryoshka dolls.

It was a small space. Getting the stuff from the burial chamber out was an enormous task that took over 80 days.

The Treasury.

Detail on one of the shrines. Beautiful, and nuts.

This is one of the shrines. They built three of these, one inside the other. And inside the smallest one was....

...the Sarcophagus. Inside this was another sarcophagus, and then a coffin. And then a mummy wearing a mask. These guys were nothing if not thorough.

Heading upstairs.

King Tut's chariot.

Sandals. Must be of a rich guy.

Believe it or not, this is a perfume bottle.

Here's the 3D-printed mummy!

My girls collaborating with other kids to complete the puzzle challenge that was part and parcel of the exhibit. Go team!

Nuns

A recent Elizabeth doodle. Possibly inspired by the musical Newsies (which is worth seeing -- the Broadway version; I can't vouch for the Christian Bale movie from the 90s.)

I really like how clean this is.

posted from Bloggeroid

Block Party '18

We had a nice, subdued and rainy block party. We met some new neighbors and connected with the old neighbors. There was a fair amount of speculation about Stan's House, which is currently for sale at a ridiculous price off $375,000 (down from the original and more ridiculous $400K).

Elizabeth organized her annual scavenger hunt, which was met with mixed results. Elizabeth is pretty tough with the puzzles. She wanted to do a treasure hunt game, but after I (as her crash test dummy) failed twice on the clues, I declared it impossible. She ended up with just the scavenger hunt, which turned out pretty well.

Barb had invited the local firefighters, who showed up just after all the kids had run off to quarters unknown. So the adults did their best to geek out on the fire fighting equipment before they drove away, sirens blaring.

We had a great time.

Suzanne Loves Dogs

Suzanne is so much a friend to dogs that she sewed (with a little help from her Mom) pajamas for Ruf-Ruf, her favorite stuffed animal.

When Elizabeth was painting faces at the Block Party, Suzanne choose to be transformed into a dog.

She really, really, really wants a real dog, but so far Barb and I have held steadfast in our refusal. But it's hard to resist her cute puppy dog face!

posted from Bloggeroid

Face Painting

The annual block party is coming up. Elizabeth really wants to provide face painting as a service. We got her a starter kit, and of course Suzanne was her first subject.

posted from Bloggeroid