Tolkien Fans – a great new experience
Photo: Lothlorien by ZedZaP…. / © Some rights reserved.
Our household is chock full of Tolkien fans. We’ve enjoyed the basics, ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings’. Some have read ‘The Silmarillion’. And my oldest dove deep and has read ‘The History of Middle Earth’ volumes 1-12, and every other work of Tolkien he can get his hands on.
So a couple years ago when The Tolkien Professor started his podcasts (free on iTunes) we subscribed. I was actually the latest to climb aboard the Tolkien train, having not enjoyed it as a boy. But through listening to the Tolkien Professor, I have come to really appreciate and enjoy Tolkien immensely.
All that is a pre-cursor to the Tolkien Professor’s recent announcement about the launch of the Mythgard Institute. It is an online institute that will offer courses with two paths: people who wish to pursue an MA, and people who just want to audit the course.
The first course this fall is The Great Tales: Tolkien and the Epic and we’ve signed up as a family to take the course.
If you are a Tolkien fan, check out the Mythgard Institute.
Digital book rentals for student
Saw this today, it will be fascinating to see what happens over the next 5 years in this category.
Amazon announced rentals of books for students which can help save quite a lot of money. What I found especially interesting is that Amazon will keep the notes for students even after the rental is over.
“Normally, when you sell your print textbook at the end of the semester you lose all the margin notes and highlights you made as you were studying. We’re extending our Whispersync technology so that you get to keep and access all of your notes and highlighted content in the Amazon Cloud, available anytime, anywhere – even after a rental expires. If you choose to rent again or buy at a later time, your notes will be there just as you left them, perfectly Whispersynced.”
Still here
Last week I received an email from someone asking, justifiably, if we were still here and supporting this thing. It’s been since October that I’ve posted to the blog, and much longer since we’ve added any new features.
On the plus side, it means that our full time gigs are going well. I’ve been very busy at my full-time job at Gomoll Research + Design, and Dave is developing away with TexoDev on several different projects.
That said, this labor of love for myhomeschoolplan needs to come further up to the front. So I’m going to (try to) treat this project like it’s an client. I’m going to block out time each week to move the ball further down the field, even if it’s just a couple yards at a time.
We’re back.
Vacation Review: New York Day 3 (Part 2)
Vacation Review: New York Day 3 (Part 2)
In Part 1 of the Day 3 review I talked about our trip to the Cloisters, owned by the Met. Later that day, we took the subway back down to the upper west side of Central Park, walked through Central Park, grabbed some NY hot dogs, and headed over to the Met. This is another place that can be overwhelming, we could have easily spent three days here alone. But we had done our research online ahead of time so we knew what we wanted to spend time on before we arrived. For us, the focus was on the Greco-Roman sculptures and Egyptian artifacts. As a bonus, the Museum had some fun scavenger hunts for lack of a better term for the kids, one that was centered around Percy Jackson. We also made sure we saw some of the Masters. The kids would repeatedly ask “so, this is a REAL Picasso {or Van Gogh, etc.}?” It was staggering to see the amount of art work the Met has. Enjoy the photos below, my favorite was of the artist who was sketching a picture of the sculpture. Art begetting art.
Vacation Review: New York Day 3 (part 1)
Day Three was Good Friday, an important day in the Church Calendar. Serendipity stepped in and we visited the Cloisters on this day. I say this because we had low expectations about our visit, but, as we were studying medieval times, thought this would be a good place to visit. In the end, it turned out to be a very spiritual experience for us.
Located on four acres overlooking the Hudson River in northern Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park, the building incorporates elements from five medieval French cloisters–quadrangles enclosed by a roofed or vaulted passageway, or arcade–and from other monastic sites in southern France. Three of the cloisters reconstructed at the branch museum feature gardens planted according to horticultural information found in medieval treatises and poetry, garden documents and herbals, and medieval works of art, such as tapestries, stained-glass windows, and column capitals. Approximately five thousand works of art from medieval Europe, dating from about A.D. 800 with particular emphasis on the twelfth through fifteenth century, are exhibited in this unique and sympathetic context. (via http://www.ny.com/museums/cloisters.html )
On Friday morning we hopped on the subway a block from our apartment, and within 20 minutes we were at the northern part of Manhattan island. We had planned on spending an hour or so at the Cloisters, but spent over three hours there. The setting and ambiance put us in a contemplative mood as we wandered through the castle-like structure.
The structure itself is amazing as it made of actual structures of different cloisters including some of the doors, walls, gates, etc.
The garden is very serene too.
But we found the tapestries to be the most impressive pieces. These are very old and very stunning. The scale of these tapestries is incredible, they fill up entire walls in some cases. We also loved seeing some of the pieces from 500-1000 AD, some older. Our favorite piece was a rosary bead about the size of a golf ball with intricate carvings on it.
While I wouldn’t say this is New York’s best kept secret, we went during the week and it was not crowded, and many people we spoke to about it, including locals, gave us a similar response, “I’ve heard about it, but never gone.”
To visitors and locals alike, I say emphatically, “Go.”
Links
http://www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/the_cloisters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloisters
Vacation Review: New York Day 2
In my last post I described day 1 of our trip. Day 1 as I described it was our first full day. We arrived on a Tuesday afternoon and visited Times Square, our Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island Trip was on Wednesday. Also, after visiting Ellis Island on Day 1, we then spent some time in the financial district. We saw the World Trade Center, NYSE, and other places in that area. We really liked visiting Trinity Church, the kids thought it was amazing to see the tombstone for Alexander Hamilton and Robert Fulton among others.
With Day 2, we just rolled out of bed and went over to the Natural History Museum, as our apartment was literally across the street. This was one of my favorite places. The museum received a lot of attention from the movie Night at the Museum, and thankfully the attention is well-deserved. We had a terrific time. The size, scale, and scope of this building is breath-taking.
To maximize your day, I would encourage you to plan ahead. My wife is great at this. She went out to their website and looked at the exhibits with our kids. She also printed off some maps so we could get a sense for how we wanted to go through the building. We were lucky in that the Silk Road Exhibit was there, which is a traveling exhibit that details cities along what was called the Silk Road, going from China to Baghdad.
The permanent exhibits are equally impressive. From ancient civilizations to items from outer space, the museum has plenty to see. My favorite room was the ocean room (I’m sure that’s not its name) with an enormous whale and hundreds of other oceanic creatures.
We spent an entire day there and were exhausted. If we had stayed in NY longer, this could have been a two-day visit for sure. But at the end of the day our brains were mush so we discovered another treasure, an outdoor one: Central Park.
Vacation Review: New York day 1
As our ‘big’ vacation this year, my wife, 3 kids and I, went to New York over spring break. Yes, it was over three months ago, but I decided to not let that stop me. I’ll be posting some reviews of the places we went.
On our first day there we visited the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.
A couple tips:
- Make your reservations well ahead of time so that you can get the time and tour you want. (We had booked for a 2pm ferry ride but the ticket person said if we got there before 8:30 AM we could get on the first ferry even though it was sold out, and she was right.)
- You can choose to go to the island the Statue of Liberty is on, go up to the pedestal area, or go up to the highest point allowed. We chose to go to pedestal which was great. We were inside the statue of liberty and got to look up and see how it was built.
- They have a nice walking museum as you wind your way to the statue that gives you a history of the building of the statue. For instance, I learned that there was terrorism in NJ back in WW1! Some german spies blew up a munitions dump and the blast actually damaged part of the statue.
As much as I loved the Statue of Liberty, the real treat was Ellis Island. Ellis Island was not open as a museum when I visited the Statue of Liberty back in 1981, so this was my first visit. Both my wife and I had relatives that came to America from Ellis Island, so there was a special significance to both of us. Regardless of that connection, the curators have done an amazing job of making this place ‘come to life’ and show what it was like. As an aside, kudos to Francis Ford Coppola. When we got home I put in the first part of The Godfather Part II where Vito Corleone goes through Ellis Island and it matched everything the Ellis Island Museum said, down to checking the immigrants eyes.
The museum has scores of pictures, oral histories in every room, artifacts, a room with a great use of visuals to show the scope of people that came to the island, and a library where you can research your relatives (note, the library is the same access that you can get from the web, but it was still neat to do the research at the island.)
We ended up spending over 3 hours at Ellis Island and I can’t recommend it highly enough. In my head I’m always looking for the educational angle with my kids on our vacations, but I didn’t have to here. I think an old tagline of the History Channel was “Where History comes alive.” The same can be said of Ellis Island.
Then and Now
In My Tribe
You’d think I would ‘get it’. I was the kid who loved the Godfather from way too young an age. I’ve read every bio about Frank Sinatra I could get my hands on. An italian inventor discovered something first and didn’t get credit? I was all over it.
Why, because I’m Italian, and it mattered to me. I wanted to know about my tribe, know that others before me in my tribe had done great things.
But I didn’t equate what that would mean to my daughter. I never understood the need for her to do the same thing with her tribe, girls.
I get it now. She loves to hear about women who have done great things. Even better, girls. She is an athlete and loves to see women’s soccer or basketball, especially at the college or high school level. And recently when tpt (Twin Cities Public Television) launched the SciGirls show, I knew she’d pay attention. SciGirls hits two tribes for her, the show is based in Minneapolis, put on by Minneapolis Public Radio, which is where we live. And the SciGirls are a group of upper middle school to high school girls, who love doing math and science, or more appropros, STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math). Each episode deals with a particular storyline, and a set of four girls typically meet up with a woman in the appropriate field who helps guide them to either solving a problem or simply learning about a new thing. The SciGirls have gone on archaeological digs, learned about pollution, and how to build a movable model for a parade (teaching them to start with prototypes), to name a few. It is a terrific show.
We’ve also discovered Danica McKellar’s Books on math. These books, with titles like “Math Doesn’t Suck” and “Hot X – algebra” are meant to demystify math and make smart ‘cool’, especially for girls. If you recognize Danica, she was Winnie on “Wonder Years” which was a great show when I was growing up. Well, Danica went on to major in math graduating summa cum laude from UCLA. She has devoted herself to helping young girls succeed in Math. While the anecdotes sometimes are too girly for my daughter, e.g. stories about shopping or boys aren’t my daughters thing, Danica takes a casual in tone yet serious in learning approach to math that has resonated at our household.
I recommend both the show SciGirls, and the books by Danica. Just as important, I recommend you pay attention to whether your kids will learn more and be more interested if you can point out members of their ‘tribe’ who have come before.
Links:
Encouraging Creativity: Painting my daughter’s bedroom
My daughter Ruthie, age 10, has had the same bedroom layout since we moved to Minnesota five years ago. When she asked if she could re-do her bedroom, we decided to use this as a chance to provide an outlet for her creativity.I was inspired by Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture where he showed pictures of his childhood bedroom.
From Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture – his childhood bedroom
Technology has made our lives easier since then, however, so there is actual ‘whiteboard’ paint that turns a portion of your wall into a whiteboard.
The before photo:
Step 1: This step occurred the day before painting. My wife took out some graphing paper and she and Ruthie made a scale drawing of her bedroom, with scale two-dimensional models of the furniture. This allowed them to move the furniture around several times without any back-aches for me! Ruthie had to do all the math for this, although she was enjoying this so much she professed to us “this isn’t math.”
Step 2: I went to my local Home Depot to purchase the whiteboard paint, and, while there, saw they sell paint that makes the walls magnetic too.
Step 3: I put primer down first on the wall where we would be putting the whiteboard and yellow border. After the primer, we painted a rough middle section with the magnet paint. Knowing this would be painted over, I wasn’t too concerned about being exact. It worked out fine, but if I had to do it over again, I’d have been more precise, you do notice a little difference.
Step 4: We put up a tape border around the section of the wall where the whiteboard paint would be. We painted the whiteboard section first (two coats) and then waited a day. The next day we painted the yellow around the wall. And when I say we I mean we. Everyone helped, and Ruthie did a fair bit of the painting herself.
Results:
In this last photo, she has created a door that leads into her brothers room. As long as they don’t actually knock out the wall to create a real door, I think we’re in good shape.
Update on site outage
First and foremost, we are really sorry about the site being down this week. We are going to add a month to every paying customers activation period. And if you were in a trial period this month, we will extend the trial an additional month.
What happened: Our web host provider made a change on the server and platform that our site is on this past weekend. The change which would be ‘invisible’ obviously caused a lot of pain. Not only was our site down but our developer was unable to even login to the site to try and troubleshoot.
What are we going to do: This is the second time we have had an outage based on our provider so we are going to look for an alternative provider if we can find one that is more reliable. If we stay with this provider, there are still some options we can take technically to try and minimize this from happening.
This was especially troubling this week as we were unable to get a message out to you all about the problem, so we are going to make some changes there to, so that if the site it down we can still let you all know the status.
As always, thanks so much for you support.