The Mask

 Behold, the Mask. (Not the best picture. It was still drying on a sheet of cardboard when I took this. But this is what he did.)

Well, that was a full day...

So, owing to some minor digestive issues I worked from home yesterday. And I spent most of it trying to troubleshot a weird issue on a test server, where something about the SSL setup seems to be causing parts of the application -- but not all of it! --to fail. 

Except that just before I got on a call to try to troubleshoot that, Secondborn came rushing out of his room to ask if I knew where his mask was. Well, all right: it was time for Art class, so clearly this would be the mask he'd been building for the last two weeks in art. It was... well, for starters it was not in his room. It was not in the living room. It was not in the kitchen, nor the back bedroom. It was, in fact, nowhere to be found. 

So I emailed his art teacher to explain that he really was looking for it and really couldn't find it and had enlisted my help, and that him not working on it was not a failure of motivation but rather a clear case of massive disorganization on our end. Somewhere in there I got in touch with Beautiful Wife, who was pretty sure that it had gotten thrown away when she cleared all the trash out from under his bed. 

Well, okay. I mean, not ideal, since I'd promised the art teacher that one way or another we'd get the project done last night. But we could work with this; we'd just have to redo what he'd done on the mask so far, and then add the next steps. So I went back and finished work. 

After work, I took Secondborn with me on a couple of errands (he wanted to buy some Pokemon cards and we were nearly out of milk) and then came back, ate dinner, and then finally we started on the mask again. Since we were doing it from scratch, I broke out the X-acto knife and did most (but not all) of the cutting. Secondborn sketched out the pieces we needed to cut, and then I went over them with various pieces of spray paint and we glued them in place. 

It went well and we got it done, but that took pretty much everything I had; there was no writing last night. But, well, that's how it goes: sometimes you finish the project, sometimes the project finishes you.

Death by Science Fair Project

So, in the midst of the utter chaos a couple of weeks back, I discovered that Firstborn was a full month and half behind on his science fair project. He essentially hadn't submitted anything to the approval site, and so despite the fact that we'd come up with a pretty good set of experiments he wasn't even approved yet. And yeah, the whole thing is due in the middle of November.

Well, Friday night he updated the last of his corrections and Sunday morning he received his approval.

And thank the dark gods for the time change, because without that extra hour of sleep I don't think either of us would have survived.

Setting up the experiments wasn't actually too bad; the real issue was that he has to keep a journal of all this, which meant I needed for him to write down everything that we were going to do before we started doing it. And that took a lot longer than it should have, mostly because he was radically overthinking the whole thing. Finally I made him pull on shoes and the two of us took a long walk while I talked about what the journal really needed to have, which is basically "a lot of sentences". (I did refine that to point out that yes, they needed to be a detailed description of what we were doing and why, and what issues we were expecting to encounter and what we were going to do about them.)

So I finally got him writing while I went off to pick up some supplies that we were going to need to resolve one of those problems, and shortly after I got back we were ready to start. (And, of course, I have to remember to take pictures all along the way.)

So now it's two-thirty on Sunday and we've got the main multi-day portions of the experiments set up, and more journal-writing done, and I am drained. I need to do some laundry. I want to do some writing. But I think this blog entry is about what I'm going to accomplish.

School projects are going to be the death of me yet.

Cardboard Cartography Complete

This morning, we have pictures (at last!) of the finished project. Well, mostly finished. There was still one figurine taped to his location-square, because his glue hadn't finished drying overnight and when I tested him, well... we had to re-glue him. But all the labels have been added, and the path, and a compass rose, and anyway by the time Firstborn had to give his presentation on it everything was dry and good to go. And we only had one Sharpie accident (not to be confused with a Shar-Pei accident, which is a different thing altogether) and it only required us to re-spraypaint one small section of the map.

I'll try to get some better pictures when it comes back from school; the top-down view really doesn't do justice to the the 3D-ness of the map.

Carboard Cartography, Part Two

The next step was to place the captions for the locations under the main map, against the backdrop, and glue them into place so they were visible through the cut-outs. After that, we glued down the mountains and the forest, which completed our lesson in cardboard geology.

As you can see, it's still not really done yet - the locations (spraypainted white) will need to be fitted into place, and the path of the journey will need to be marked, and we'll need to Label All The Things. But you're getting to experience the process of building this in much the same way we did: slowly and painfully, with a lot of waiting between steps.

Cardboard Cartography, Part One

So, our first step was to sketch out the map on the sheet of cardboard. The next step was to take a second piece of cardboard, sketch out the forest (again) and cut that shape out of the smaller sheet of cardboard. Then we did the same for the mountain.

The forest and the mountain came out of the same sheet, so they fit together perfectly. They're going to go on top of the main map, giving the whole thing a 3D element. We spray-painted them (green and gray, respectively) and set them aside. All of that was on Sunday. On Monday, cut out all the Important Locations from the main map, being careful to label them as we went. Then we painted the main map tan, and the cut-out Locations white. The next step will be to glue the main map to the backboard, so the locations will have a floor under them when we press them back into place. We have to wait for the paint to dry, first.

It may not look like much now, but when it finally comes together I think it's going to be pretty awesome. The assignment calls for a "three-dimensional, interactive map showing the journey and at least seven important locations" and I'm pretty sure we've got that done.

School Project: The Map Of Doom

So the boys are out of school today, and Firstborn has a project due Thursday. I am determined to have this project finished, y'know, today.

The assignment is to read a book involving a journey -- they're reading The Hobbit in his class -- and then create some sort of interactive 3D map, which he can use to give a presentation. Now, I had ideas for how we might approach this. I favored using Martha Wells' excellent The Cloud Roads, in no small part because the book doesn't include a map of its own. So on the one hand, we'd have to build the map based on the text, and on the other hand there wouldn't really be any wrong way to do it. Plus, it would have been fun to build some of the locations in that book.

But Firstborn had decided to work from one of his Minecraft books, specifically the one that's... I don't know... number fifteen or sixteen in a series. So I committed myself to reading it. And it's... To be fair, I can see why he enjoyed it. But the books are intensely first-person stream of consciousness, so there's probably two pages of explanation/digression for every page of plot advancement. Plus, the author is clearly writing a serial: the individual books aren't very long, but they're part of a single, unbroken storyline. The result of these two factors is that the book I read simply didn't have enough locations (or events, for that matter) to fill in the required Seven Important Locations that we needed for the map.

Y'all, I have now read four of these books, digressions and all.

But we have now gotten enough information together to start building the map. We're building it in layers, out of cardboard, so that each location will be a little cut-out square that you can lift up to see information about why it's important and what happens there. This will involve spray paint, and white glue, and printing relevant text in blocks that will fit underneath the removable squares. It will absolutely not strain my concentration to the breaking point or leave me frustrated, drained, and questioning my worth as a parent and as a human being in general.

But just in case, send more whiskey.