Thanksgiving in California: 36 Hours in San Diego

Here's our first day in California--at the beach!

My father-in-law is a Navy vet and thanks to him, we were able to stay on the naval base in San Diego for one night. Here's what the beach looks like outside the Navy Lodge:

I spent much of this beach morning lying flat on my back in the sand, camera in hand so I could photograph the helicopters that kept flying directly overhead:

And here's one of the helicopters:

If you blow up the photo enough, you can see that there is totally someone sticking their helmeted head out the door and looking down at me. They're thinking, "Why is that crazy lady lying in the sand taking photos? Must be a spy!"

That's probably not the last time somebody thought that we were spies, either. I photographed EVERYTHING. Who knows when I'll get to sightsee on a military base again!

After we finally managed to drag the kids out of the water, my father-in-law took us on a driving tour so that I could photograph everything else. There were aircraft carriers (we were back at this particular aircraft carrier later in the evening for "Taps," but I had a giant Starbucks coffee in my hands instead of my camera, darn it)--

Yes, I'm going to show you all sides of every aircraft carrier I saw. I'm also humming the "Top Gun" theme at you, just so you know:

--and submarines--

Yes, I'm photographing a submarine THROUGH A FENCE. I'm totally a spy.

--and the most expensive, ugliest destroyer ever built:

The kids had already been to Cabrillo National Monument before with their grandparents (and earned their Junior Ranger badge, because of COURSE), but my partner and I had never been, so we stopped by for a quick look.

Look, another destroyer!

There's a handy spotting guide at the overlook:

I didn't photograph the commissary, either, but we did get road trip snacks and the best bar of soap EVER while we were there. I did not buy a massive toy model aircraft carrier (darn it). The older kid super wanted a Navy sweatshirt, but we did not buy that, either. Our luggage was already worryingly overweight.

Instead, here's an installation of Bob Hope doing USO tours:



It's really beautiful. Next to it, though, is a giant recreation of Unconditional Surrender, which was really gross because every single person was photographing themselves pretending to look up the nurse's skirt.

Nice way to casually degrade women, Tourists!

The next day, we really needed to leave San Diego and end up at Joshua Tree National Park, but first, we had to make two stops at the kids' top requests.

First, doughnuts for the littler kid!

The night before, we'd stayed at a hotel across from Balboa Park with valet service. As the valet handed my partner the keys to the car that morning, he asked where we were headed, and I told him we were going to Donut Bar.

"You really need to try Devil's Dozen," he replied.

So we did both. I mean, of course. And you know what?

We all liked Devil's Dozen better. So thank you, anonymous valet!

This butterbeer doughnut is from Donut Bar:

While my partner and the big kid were in San Diego by themselves, they'd checked out a dog-friendly beach that was right by their hotel. The big kid LOVED it and longed to go back, so before we left San Diego entirely, we did just that. It turned out to be so awesome, indeed, that we accidentally spent the entire morning there:

The kids really loved random doggies coming up to make friends. And a dog only peed on the big kid's sand castle once, and that was after she was finished working on it, anyway.

I didn't get any photos of us actually swimming in the water, but we totally did. It was cold, yeah, but not after the first couple of seconds. Practically nothing to us ice-in-the-bones frozen Midwesterners:

Well, we WERE pretty cold when we finally finished swimming...

No matter, though, because all we did was hop back in the rental car and hit the road. We were on our way to chollo cacti and Joshua trees!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Thanksgiving in California: Attack Seagulls and Sea Doggos

What to do when your brother-in-law is getting married completely across the country from one kid's Very Important Nutcracker Rehearsals?

You send your husband and the other kid to go party without you, sigh... No fancy clothes for me and Syd. No fancy dinners. No dancing. No wine (well, there may have been a little wine for me after she went to bed, but still. Wedding wine is better). While Matt and Will flew out to California together to hit the beach and do fancy stuff, I drove Syd back and forth to hours of daily rehearsals, and in between we did stuff like hike through the frozen, really freaking cold landscape that we were stuck in:

Seriously, that's an actual ice storm. Meanwhile, Matt and Will were flitting around California's wine country in short sleeves.

Jealousy is a legitimate emotion, Friends. It's okay to feel jealous as hell when your husband hangs out in paradise while you stay back in the frozen wasteland to chauffeur your kid and walk the dog.

But even The Nutcracker has to give its ballerinas a Thanksgiving vacation, so at 2:00 am on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, approximately 8 hours after Syd's final rehearsal before the break, up she and I got ourselves to drive to the airport and get on the first flight of the day to San Diego:

Here's what the Long-Term Parking shuttle shelter looks like at 4:00 am. It had a button to press for a space heater that would function for exactly 10 seconds before shutting off again. I got VERY good at pressing that space heater button exactly on time.

We found the sunrise on the way to our Phoenix layover. 

 We were able to get to California in time to tag along on the last 24 hours of post-wedding festivities, and then it was time to start our own, personal Thanksgiving vacation! First on the to-do list was to head down the West Coast back to San Diego, checking out every beach and tide pool on the way.

We did a pretty good job of it:

We started at Scripps Beach, then hiked north all the way to Black's Beach, far enough that we could see the Mushroom House funicular before turning around. We did NOT hike all the way to the north end of Black's Beach, where I'm told that clothing is optional...

Syd's first time in the water on this trip--doesn't that make a nice change from those ice storm photos from two days prior?!?

You can take the ballerina out of the ballet studio, but...

I'd say we were happy to be warm!

This girl was well used to the beautiful weather by then, but she still loves the novelty of digging in the sand.

Matt's always taking photos of me doing something dorky. Here, I'm investigating a tide pool.

Yep, another tide pool. You can't see something right unless you get your face in it!

And here, the children and I have found a total stranger to tell us all about the California sea hare. You can take the homeschooler out of her homeschool, but...

This is the Ellen Browning Scripps Memorial Pier. It's very photogenic!

 Next on the list was sea lions (thanks to YouTube, we can't stop calling them "sea doggos." Seriously. Pause here, go to YouTube, and search for "sea doggos." You can thank me in the comments). We drove a little further south, stopped for sandwiches (and saladitos, which I had never even seen before and I can't decide if I liked them or not, but still I couldn't stop eating them), and thanked our lucky stars that we were able to find a parking spot within a mile of the Children's Pool--Sundays in La Jolla are CROWDED!

We lucked out even more to score a bench on top of the cliff, overlooking the ocean (when I say "score," I mean that I saw people getting off a bench off in the distance and instructed my children to sprint for it to claim it for us. I'm very good at delegating), so before hiking and exploring, we sat down to eat our sandwiches in peace. It was a pretty crowded area, like I said, with lots of the whole variety of humanity there, so in the middle of my first bite of sandwich, when I suddenly felt a "Whoosh!" an inch from my face and I got knocked forward on my seat, I thought that somebody had come up behind me and had tried to punch me in the back of the head. Instead, what had really happened was that a seagull had swooped down and neatly plucked the entire top half of my sandwich out of my hands AND MY MOUTH. Like, I was BITING INTO MY SANDWICH, and a seagull came and stole half of it!

Matt and the kids saw the whole thing, and we basically just blinked at each other until someone noticed the seagull sitting just a few feet away, gulping down my delicious sandwich and then eyeing me for more. We spent the rest of our lunch with Matt standing in front of us to guard us from further attacks.

I mean, WHAT THE HELL?!?

After our lunch, we hiked and explored more of the coast--

--making our way to Children's Pool and the seal rocks just south of the seawall that encloses it:

We found the sea doggos!!!

Here, Matt and Will are at the far end of the sea wall, overlooking Children's Pool.

And then it was off to meet the grandparents, who were hosting us in San Diego, for dinner. Next time, we do all things San Diego, including the Navy Base!

CK-12 Biology Chapter 2: The Chemistry of Life

The kids and I are using CK-12's 9th/10th grade Biology textbook as the spine for this year's biology curriculum--for Will, this will be recorded as Honors Biology on her transcript.

In addition to that textbook, we're using The Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments as our lab manual, and of course we've got a plethora of other reading/viewing/listening resources and hands-on activities to enrich our study.

• Lesson Plans for Chapter 1
• Lesson Plans for Chapter 4
• Lesson Plans for Chapter 5
• Lesson Plans for Chapter 7

The kids read chapter 2 in sections, completing the questions at the end of each section. At the end of the chapter, they took the test (from the CK-12 Biology Quizzes and Tests book) with an open book. 

We had the most fun with Section 2.1: Matter and Organic Compounds--there's a lot of good, meaty, hands-on stuff in this section!

Along with the textbook, we used the following resources:

• (for Syd) BrainPop's movie and game for the Periodic Table of Elements
• Periodic Table of Videos from the University of Nottingham
• (for Syd) BrainPop's movie for Compounds and Mixtures
• Your Guide to the Periodic Table of Elements
• (for Will) The Disappearing Spoon
• The Periodic Table: A Visual Guide to the Elements
• The Secret Life of the Periodic Table
• The Periodic Table: Elements with Style
• Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe
• Molecules: The Elements and Architecture of Everything

We have a few hands-on activities already kicking around the house that we used: a PTOE puzzle that was a Christmas gift several years ago, and that we assembled as part of our family time for a few evenings in a row, and this DIY PTOE game, "Quick Six," that the kids and I constructed some other time when we were studying chemistry. Whenever it was, the kids did really fine work on it, with all the illustrations neatly colored in, and I'm glad that we kept it on our games shelf all this time.

For memory work and reference, I printed a one-page Periodic Table for the kids to color and put in their science notebooks, and I printed a giant, multi-page, full-color Periodic Table that I taped together and put on the wall of the playroom.

We covered the section's study of organic compounds by building molecules using our Zometools set, and testing for organic compounds in food:

This was a crazy, elaborate, challenging experiment that they're probably not doing in a lot of other sixth grade classrooms, but the kids loved it, and I think we'll repeat it again when we get to our biology's chapters on human biology.

For Section 2.2, Biochemical Reactions, I set up this process-oriented experimentation with exothermic reactions, loosely based on this experiment, for the kids:

We've done lots of exothermic reactions before, including with lye, potassium nitrate and sugar, and the ubiquitous hydrogen peroxide with potassium iodide as a catalyst, so the kids were familiar enough with this activity that I really could set it up as a process-oriented exploration. If your kids, unlike mine, haven't gone through several stages of obsession with homemade exothermic reactions, you could mediate this as a more guided experience.

Section 2.3: Water, Acids, and Bases, was also a review--we've done pH chemistry over and over and over again since the kids were preschoolers. I gave the kids some of our collection of pH test strips (you can also use this red cabbage pH indicator), and set them to work testing and recording the pH of a dozen or so substances each:

Good times.

This felt like a big chapter, with what felt like four big concepts to cover. As always, I do a lot more research than I do assigning, so here are suitable activities that we could have--but didn't--complete for this chapter:

• Periodic Table of the Elements cupcakes. I don't know why I want to make these. That's too many cupcakes for us to eat. The decoration would take FOREVER. And yet... I want to make these sooooo badly!
• Periodic Table of the Elements Battleship.
• Interactive Periodic Table of the Elements
• Find the mistakes on the Periodic Table of Elements.
• Paint the Periodic Table of Elements. I really want to make plaster of Paris cubes in a silicone muffin tray and use that for this PTOE.
• Periodic Table of the Elements Chart. For Perler beads or cross-stitch!
• Violet Jelly. Did you know that violets are also a natural pH indicator!

And now, on to cells!

Turn an Old Greeting Card into a Notebook

I freelance over at Crafting a Green World, an eco-friendly crafting blog. Every now and then, on a non-regular basis, I'll share one of my favorite tutorials with you..

...such as this one! I originally published this upcycled greeting card notebook tutorial right here at Crafting a Green World.

Greeting cards are more than just a waste of paper...

Well, they are if you upcycle them!

Here's a useful and cute way to upcycle a greeting card into a blank book. Use it as a travel or nature or art journal, or just use it for your shopping lists. No matter how you use it, you'll have given new life to one old greeting card, upcycling it into something brand-new.

You will need:

Greeting card. My favorite cards to use are the ones with personal notes inside--it's an easy way to keep your loved one with you in the day-to-day.

Blank paper. You can use any paper that you want. Look for paper that has at least the same dimensions as the greeting card when it's unfolded.

Embroidery needle and embroidery floss. You're actually going to bind this book. No staplers for you!

  

1. Measure and cut the inside pages. Measure the length and height of your greeting card; your paper should be about 1/4" shorter in each of these dimensions.

  

Your book will need to have fairly few pages, although there's some wiggle room here, depending on the thickness of the paper that you choose. I took this paper from the inside of a vintage scrapbook, so it's pretty heavy, and I found that eight pages were just about the perfect number for my little greeting card books.

2. Align the paper with the greeting card cover. You can do this really precisely, but for these little books, I just eyeball the alignment. Center the paper over the greeting card, with the inside of the card facing the paper, and then use paper clips to hold it there.

3. Poke holes for the binding. Use the template from my bookbinding tutorial here to poke five holes down the center of the book, along the fold in the greeting card:

  

4. Stitch the binding. Use that same template to stitch the binding with embroidery floss. Your floss will start and end in the same spot, so it's easy to tie the two ends into a square knot and then trim them:

  

 These books can be made quite quickly, and they make cute easy gifts. Keep a couple in your bag at all times, and you'll never be without paper when inspiration strikes!