On Saturday I took the boys to the astronomy club thing again like last month. They were celebrating the 50th birthday of NASA, and did the usual circus of interesting-looking things, watching a bit of a sci-fi film, then making a model. This time the model was the Martian rovers, and we conquered the complicated nets to produce decent results – see Flickr. While you’re about it, there are some photos of an excellent thing that covered most of the ceiling.
Prof. Andy Fabian retired from the department that hosts the club, and they wanted to show all the people he’d worked with, a bit like the ErdÅ‘s number, the Bacon number or even the ErdÅ‘s-Bacon number. All the 781 people he’d worked with had their name on a piece of paper hanging from the ceiling, with a strand of wool linking them back to Andy Fabian in the middle. The colour reflected the kind of subject, and working on different kinds of thing with him meant you got a different coloured strand for each area. It was fabulous, and the photos don’t really do it justice.
When we got back, the children chilled out and watched Robots on DVD while we caught up with jobs / sleeping.
Yesterday we headed off to London again, an hour later than planned because the heat is making the children tired and have trouble getting off to sleep and we didn’t have the heart to wake them early. The main reason to go was the Summer Sling Show. I managed to pack most things apart from Story of the World, which was what we’d planned to do on the train again. Katy fished out a pot of bubble mixture which everyone (including much of the rest of the carriage) enjoyed, so the journey wasn’t too hard. Fortunately for us the industrial action on the railway appeared to have had no effect.
We avoided the tube this time as everything was in walking distance. We all headed off to the sling show, had lunch, Katy stayed with A and I took the other 3 to the British Museum, unfortunately leaving all the cameras with Katy. It was really hot, full and we all quickly wilted. We did the first half of a children’s backpack thing on Ancient Greece which was great in theory but not for hot and tired children – to give them their due, they were well-behaved, just wrung out. Along the way round we saw the Rosetta Stone, a fabulous 3 foot gilt galleon that was actually a clock to announce the serving of dinner – it would move around the table, twirl the top of its masts, play a tune on a mini pipe organ and fire its cannons. Oh, and lots of ancient Egyptian burial things.
Then we staggered off to meet Katy at Coram’s Fields, where the children were revived by playing in a huge sandpit and I was revived by a cup of tea. There was a Bangladeshi festival going on, so much nice music and dancing on a stage, and chatting in person with online friends of Katy’s who had also been to the sling show earlier. Train, home, bath, bed!
