So of course, we now have a Transmogrifier.

IIRC the original device in the books was a "lift and climb under" affair but as ours was made from separate L-shaped pieces, with some tape holding everything together, a door made more sense. As with all transmogrification devices, the choice of what you might turn into is a baffling, complicated conundrum, but within a few minutes Calvin had decided on his choices:

Note that apparently a robot wasn't good enough, the robot had to have a gun. The Ninja…needs no gun. He originally had items for "Calvin" and "Rose" so that they could be turned back into themselves from some other form; When I saw this I told him to jump in, I wanted to turn him into Rose His eyes got real wide and he asked me to leave the room for a minute so he could make some adjustments. When I came back– you all are way ahead of me, right?– he was able to show me that yes in fact, he could turn into Rose and Rose could turn into Calvin and vice versa. Watching Rose try to act like Calvin was completely hysterical. But then he remembered that if you leave the setting alone it reverses the transmogrification process, and he remembered the army of Calvins sequence from the books, and the Rose option was crossed out

Shortly thereafter, Leroy Bear wandered inside because OMG A BOX so I told Calvin to quickly set it to Ninja. he closed the door, spun the dial, and opened it. Bear walked out, rubbing his face on the edge of the box, and looked up at Calvin.
Me: Did it work?
C: Well, he's dressed in black…
Me: and he walks silently…
C: and he is armed with sharp weapons…
Me: and sometimes you can't tell if he is even in the room with you…
Both of us: IT WORKED!
Me: Quick, try to turn him back!

Calvin chased Bear down, carried him over, threw him in the Transmogrifier and left it on the same setting to reverse the changes. Bear burst out of the box and thudded down the hallway, definitely not with cat-like tread.

Both of us: IT WORKED!

Oh, and those "adjustments" mentioned earlier? I hadn't noticed, but he added this:
Calvin will be the first to point out that the activation button is keyed to his thumbprint. And the wire that goes into the box is the INSIDE activation button so he can operate it himself from within. You have to love the attention to detail. Speaking of which, one last thing. Scroll up, see the box overturned on top? That's actually a protective cover for the circuit board:
A few things here fascinate me. One, the PCB is green; these days you can burn a board in any random color you like but for generations, brown was for prototypes and green was the production run. He has watched me solder synthesizer bits and picked this up via osmosis. I can also clearly see him trying to differentiate between two wire colors, a pair of ICs, one orange axial Sprague and one electrolytic capacitor, a fan, a thing he doesn't know to call a diode but that clearly has directionality and visual cues for same, AND in one of those weirdly specific things, a power connector for a 3 prong power feed like he has seen me use for modules, carrying pos/gnd/neg voltages.

We (Anne and I) have said this before but it bears repeating: never assume that your children don't hear, absorb, and remember absolutely EVERYTHING that goes by. Their learning capacity is effectively unlimited and every instant is a teachable moment.

"Sir! Our robot laser rakes have completely wiped out all nano-Migs in this sector!"

"Carry on, Soldier."

…and so that mountain of leaves that was keeping the new grass from sprouting in the backyard– where everything got dug up to put in the well and ground lines for the geothermal system– has been forcibly relocated to another quadrant.

It was 75 degrees yesterday. What. The. Hell. This time last year the snowdrifts were taller than I am.

Next we headed down to the beach. Picked up a bunch of glass, cans, and other tidal detritus, then hopped to the other side of the bridge for some winter bouldering. This is the route Calvin walks on the way home from the bus every day and he absolutely schooled me in a game of "don't touch the ground, only the rocks." Along the way he was pointing out rock stack sculptures that survived the whole winter, various ice-formations that looked like rockets or dragons, the sticks in the water that he is finally convinced are NOT Champ…it was awesome. "On the other side of those stairs is level THREE! The rocks are taller and pointier and slipperier."

Ever since he was born, this has been the greatest gift of all: seeing the world through his eyes. There is indeed treasure everywhere.

Home now for lunch, more tabla practice, and some science experiments.

Nina agreed to take photos of the event for the school and Anne helped out as well with the spare camera. That left me in the crowd with Calvin, a friend Sophie from "down the street" who came with us, and Rose. I really had no idea what to expect other than that Rose and her friends would go on promptly at 7pm and try to get through 5 verses of "Over In The Meadow." Which they did, and it was cute and they had terrible timing and questionable pitch and at any point it was clear that half of them forgot which verse they were on and isn't that the point of performing in an ensemble?

But the rest of the show was several kinds of wow. First, it was *super* chill, very clearly a "anyone who wants to can get up and do anything that they want" kind of thing, with absolutely no pressure. All the kids crowded the front of the stage and were going absolutely crazy for their friends. There were some kids playing it straight and a lot of goofy stuff. We were treated to:
* Serious-minded singers both a capella and accompanied, sometimes by friends on keyboard, sometimes by dads on guitar. A few of these boys and girls had real talent, all of them had great control of their nerves. Pitch, eh, that can be taught
* Goofy-minded singers hamming it up like crazy. This included a loud run through the LMFAO PArty anthem tune by a kid in a 3 foot diameter afro wig and his 3 friends, after which Rose emerged from the mosh pit in front of the stage and ran up to mom yelling "THAT WAS AWESOME!"
* A bunch of dance ensembles; this meant having to hear both "Friday" and "Waving Flag" (twice).
* Two kids doing pogo stick stunts to a song called "Bounce." I thought "Jump Around" would have been a better choice but they were working it.
* A group of six kids with HIP HOP written in tape on their shirts, bouncing around the stage on those giant inflatable balls with handles, remember them? So yeah, handle-ball dance ensemble.
* 3 or maybe 4 kids reciting poems, both their own and other people's, sometimes with a cloying British accent.
* A dramatic reading of "The Spider and the Fly" by a guy wearing a vampire cape on the spider side and a guy in a bowler hat with a cane on the fly side. I was expecting them to break into a Gallagher and Sheen routine. BUT INSTEAD the next duet gave us:
* A run through Who's on First! Note to children everywhere: comic timing is hard, and Lou Costello was a genius.[*]
* A girl who played mad scientist/magician, the whole point of which seemed to be an excuse to make oobleck, goop, and fart putty on stage. She seemed genuinely surprised that the crowd wanted her to throw all of her creations to them; she obliged. I also want to point out the amazingly supportive, understanding, non-gender-stereotyping crowd who let a 3rd grade girl make fart noises into a microphone for 2.5 minutes worth of continuous applause.
* Several "skits" that seemed to be mostly ad-libbed, where the script basically says "I know, let's have two party girls in a 'burning building' get attacked by a blue furry monster and the fire department saves them! OK, GO!"
* a kindergartner, singing a song about a cat. One older sister plays accompaniment on flute, while another is dressed as a cat in the background providing cat-interpretive-dance for the 8 line "song". Little girl loses her place and needs to get a line from her flautist. It were a door. a bull.
* aaaaaaand a band made up of teachers and students running through "Dancin' in the Streets".
* and some other stuff.

It went on for TWO AND A HALF HOURS. To sustain the kids who were up way past their bedtime, they broke for intermission and sold cookies, pizza, and rice crispy bars the size of my hand. Pretty much every parent who had kids who weren't passed out stayed for the duration. It was very well run, with stage managers, technicians, the works, moving microphones and instruments in and out like clockwork; I noticed, because that stuff is HARD when you're getting 30 acts on and off the same stage! Rose spent half the time up front near the stage and half the time sitting holding hands with her "boyfriend" from kindergarten, Max (Anne and I almost died from the cute).

So now the big question is: what will our kids do next year? Calvin may be ready to play tabla in public; or he may choose to sing "All Things Dull and Ugly." Rose might sing with some help from daddy or Nina on keys. We might do something completely ridiculous as a family. Clearly the bar is set way, way low

[*] Calvin said that the Who's on First skit was his favorite, and I had to youTube the original so he could get the real flavor. That led to an extended bedtime session of mining for Abbott and Costello routines, and he is now a huge fan. As great as WOF is, I think Calvin's favorite bit, as we called it a night, is the "Slowly I turn…step by step…" skit. It does my heart proud to introduce him to the classics.

He runs into the dining room shortly thereafter, grinning, and declares that he has invented "The dance of the Pajamazons."

For reference, here is his playlist this evening:
Phish – "Chalkdust Torture" ["Can't this wait 'til I'm old / Can I live while I'm young?"]
Monty Python – "All Things Dull and Ugly" [Well, He did make them all!]
Monty Python – "The Galaxy Song" [Here follows a semantic argument about speeds faster than c. "Just because you can't GO that fast doesn't mean there isn't a SPEED that fast."]
Joan Jett – "I Love Rock and Roll" [He has correctly identified that the dropped quarter note in the last chorus is the trick that makes the song rock that. much. harder.]
Johhny Cash – "Folsom Prison Blues" [a constant since he was 15 months old]
Pet Shop Boys – "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)" [Yesterday, it was "Left To My Own Devices"]
K'naan – "Wavin' Flag (Coca Cola Soccer Mix)" [eh, can't win them all]
Stuart Duncan, Chris Thile, Edgar Meyer, and Yo-Yo Ma – "Attaboy" [got this track free with coffee, it rules so hard I think Santa may have to put the album in Calvin's stocking.]
Bombino – "Tar Hani" [Still his favorite track from one of the albums of the year]
Mercan Dede – "Hininga" [Surprised me. I had to go check the track name!]

He's heard enough Phish to both enjoy it and critique the lyrics to Tweezer. Bombino we discovered together, when I was on a Taureg freedom fighter musician kick earlier this year. Note to self: he doesn't (yet) know Fela. Mercan Dede I loaded on a hunch; he listened to all 3 albums and has picked out his favorites, just like he did with the Bombino, Pet Shop Boys, and Python. Actually, thinking about it, the PSB got into his rotation because their "best of" CD was good driving around town music in CA.

If your children aren't familiar with Joan Jett and Johnny Cash by age 5 or so I…I got nothing. That's like only speaking Urdu at home in the middle of Kansas.

10 years and counting.

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Eventually the clouds blew past, or most of them at least, and we were able to take a gander. We switched from the 15mm to 12mm Plossel eyepiece tonight and even with some lingering high faint clouds the results were spectacular. We stared at the moon for a while again, then turned to Jupiter and this time, after quite a lot of fiddling with the focus, we were able to see the horizontal bands of the great cloud storms. Still no red spot; it didn't transit until 10pm or so this evening. Here's Calvin taking it in (click twice to embiggenate), during which, we had this conversation: "Calvin, can you see the bands?" "Ohhhhh yeah…yep…yep, I sure can." After five or six more turns, he was slightly less amazed…but only slightly!

When I opened the door, they both barreled out at top speed, as they do, scattering the decrepit pumpkins on the porch, charging past the piles of construction materials and around the shed, and then…they froze solid. I caught up a moment later. Bert wore his usual thin-lipped grin of concern. Ellie looked at me, gave one slow wag, then turned her attention back to the stick and hay-strewn tableau. You could almost see clouds of smoke as their little dog brains tried to process this new reality. "Where is the path? What happened to all that, that, that tall stuff and that green smelly stuff (Ed note: 5' tall mint). THERE HAS BEEN CHANGE. YOU kept me in the house the whole time, where I couldn't prevent it. Should I be worried?" I had to console them and physically lead them into a space they had been running willy-nilly through mere hours beforehand. Ellie cautiously followed me out, smiling and wagging but with her ears and head down. Bert sat down where he was, looking concerned, letting Ellie be the scout. Eventually they both decided that discretion was the better part of valor and ran off to wrestle in the front yard. I am pretty sure they figured it out later, but I was cracking up during their "first contact" moment.

Some time later, Calvin decided to help me rake the leaf pile off the yard and into the underbrush. Last year a jumping pile got snowed under and killed the grass in a big circle. It grew back surprisingly fast with the wet wet wet Spring but still, why worry? And the boy offered to help, be still my heart! We got bundled up for yardwork, and oops! It's 4:30 and November, already dark out. BUT! Papa has a headlamp. So we got the rakes and made short work of what had been a monster pile of leaves. I let Calvin wear the lamp, natch, which had me raking blind some of the time, but that's the price you pay.

The overcast skies, alas, meant no followup stargazing this evening.

Over dinner last night we got to talking about Sunspots, the solar cycle, aurorae, and the like. Calvin and Rose asked to go outside and look for some, even though I was pretty sure– you *were* aware of spaceweather.com, right?– that there were no recent flares headed our way. But in between dinner and bedtime, amidst much scrambling and bundling in gloves and hats and coats, we went out. Because I am so SMRT, I put the AstroScan out about 20 minutes ahead of time so it would be temperature adjusted.

I completely underestimated how much the kids would enjoy this. COMPLETELY. We sat on the steps for a bit to allow our pupils to dilate, bemoaned the apparent lack of Northern lights, and counted stars. Because I am a nerd, I had not one but three different iPad apps, each with a "night vision" red on red color scheme (it works!), that told us what stars, constellations, satellites, and planets were where. I love this modern age. Point the thingy at the sky, instant data, adjusted for time and location, about what you are looking at. If someone develops a USB Spectrometer or similar device, the iPad/iPhone WILL BE a Tricorder. Mark it.

After a few minutes the kids were getting restless. The moon, if you haven't noticed, is waxing currently, a few days from full, so it was the first target. With a little fiddling and some careful "just look, don't knock or kick the telescope" instruction, both of them were staring up at the man in the moon and all his mountainous, cratered glory. They were…speechless, pretty much.

As a bonus, Jupiter was visible in the same part of the sky. You can always tell the planets because they resolve to a nice clean circle, unlike the twinkly dot stars. The AstroScan is a killer scope for the price, but in all reality it isn't that powerful; you can get the moon to about fill the viewfinder with great detail, but I was disappointed to learn that it can't resolve the bands or the Great Red Spot. Or, at least, I don't think it can get the spot. I found out later that one of my apps will tell you *the specific times of day that the spot is transiting the surface and visible from earth* and I think we were looking at jupiter during that window but I want to go back out and check again to be sure. I think I also have at least one more stacking lens to double the magnification of the AstroScan and I'll have to try that. Also: anyone who buys this telescope and doesn't also purchase the laser-sight and calibrate it properly (use the moon! It's big!) is a fool. A little bit of tweaking and I was able to bull's-eye womp rats individual stars 100% of the time.

The moon was so full that we couldn't see the Milky Way; I have a calendar date set to remind me to get the kids out again on the new moon. We looked at a few stars, took another long look at the moon, and called it a night. Rose was so excited she interrupted a phone call to tell mama all about it, and we talked about what we saw during the entire bedtime tuck-in routine.

This is an easy, enjoyable wonderment. I will be cultivating it as the nights get longer, colder, and clearer!

So in brief, we've been fighting off the bloodsucking fiends for what seems like ages now. But thanks to our geothermal contractor, I now have a remedy that can be weilded from the comfort of my desk, which happens to be nearest to the source of most of the infiltrations.

That is exactly what you think it is: a handheld bug zapper. Cheap as hell, both cheap-as-in-cheaply-made and cheap-as-in-$3-plus-the-cost-of-3-D-Cells. It is– wait for it– super effective! It takes a light hand; too fast and they'll pass right through, but if you slowly swing through the flight path and keep contact for a second, pow. [*] Mosquitos, easy. Flies, much more difficult, they are fast and can, like, see in all directions and stuff, but with some practice you can get them. I have proven that it is capable of taking down a wasp, but honestly, it took an uncomfortably long time; something about the capacitive resistance of a chitinous exoskeleton, I'd wager. Anyway I got him but I had a flyswatter in my other hand just in case. Wasps: so very evil.

The warning label on the device says, "Don't touch screen while the red light is on!" The warning label on the box to the left was created by Rose. She saw me using it, we had a talk about how it looked like a toy but was not really for children, and she decided that since she still couldn't read she would make herself a pictogram warning to post next to it. I keep it in that spot; I can reach it with one hand safely without looking while keeping my eye on the trajectory of the flying target (They get into the shadows and disappear, it's uncanny).

Calvin has been carefully shielded so far from any knowledge that this device exists, for reasons that should be obvious to the parents of any 8 year old boy.

[*] "Be the bug, Danny. Be. The bug."

Today's example: I clicked over to SoundCloud to find an example track to test out shortcode-embeds on the blog [Note to LJ and DW mirror-readers; I have no idea if this will work for you, apologies in advance]. As soon as I log in, there is Brett peering at me from the sidebar with a ridiculous hat and bug-eyed DJ goggles. And yes, of course I clicked, and I listened, and I wept. So my example track is the ~9 minute collaboration below, "Wednesday."

These were the first sounds to come out of the studio when Brett and re-built it in 2009, after the water-heater flood and remodeling in the El Cerrito house. We were just noodling around testing out all the routing and for once, hit record. Brett is playing the Waldorf Q and I am on guitar; the clean guitar part and a dry Q part were laid down in the first take. Then we came back in and Brett played with the FX on the synth track while I overdubbed the fuzzy e-bow line. So this is composed solely of first takes. It's not perfect; we lost the plot partway through because of some now-forgotten distraction and after that point it's a little less together all around, but I am very happy with the first few minutes. Brett took it home and did some post-processing to create this final version; if you listen closely, you can hear him working pretty hard to "fix it in the mix"

As far as I can remember, this is the only piece of music we ever put to tape together. I have plenty of regrets about my life but that's at the top of the list. I have some of Brett's studio gear here with me now, and on that gear there are patterns, sequences, and samples. I have unfinished business to attend to, which is part of the reason for the changes I'm making in how I spend my time. More later, for certain.

Ok, took a couple tries to get DW to cooperate, but we have achieved blog-saturation!

Done: Hosted WordPress install; Livejournal import; Comments cleanup; Plugins Installed(Avalicious, Better Tag Cloud, Comment Reply Notification, Google +1 button, Google XML Sitemaps, JetPack, JournalPress, LJ Importer, More Fields, OpenID, Simple Twitter Connect, wpuntexturize); Plugins deactivated for now (W3 Total Cache, WP Super cache, WPTouch, Spam Free WordPress, Akismet, PubSubHubBub, Google Analytics)

To Do: Figure if default server size and php config will allow caching without eating available mem or hitting a configured resource ceiling; install Gallery or Coppermine and any required WP integration plug-in; Customize a theme; Cancel G+ and FB accounts; Configure WP->DW->LJ crossposting.

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