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Journal

Went flying yesterday

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Curt Niermann took Samith and I flying yesterday while Lauren went to some dinner celebrating the school accreditation visit. I think I got the better end of the deal.

About two years ago, at Lincoln Lutheran’s dinner & auction, Curt bid on and won a flying package. I was expecting to just take off, fly around for a bit and land. I think that’s what we all thought, because we were surprised when our pilot asked if we wanted to go to Nebraska City to see the flooding.

We were all up for that, but we made a little detour first. We flew up to Seward and I have a 4 minute video that didn’t really turn out very good. In person we could pick out all sorts of detail, but the video isn’t that good. I might try messing with it and posting it later. We practically flew over Sam’s house.

Then we followed highway 34 into Lincoln.

It was cool to see the trip I take every day to school from the air. My favorite part of air travel is seeing things from this relatively low altitude. It’s like a real life game of Sim City. The Lincoln air traffic controller in Lincoln gave us permission to fly over Lincoln. We were actually pretty close to Curt’s house right before we flew over the airport.

The safest place to fly near an airport is right over the airport. It took me a while to figure out why.

I was on the wrong side of the plane to get a good shot of the capital or Memorial Stadium. But as we cruised down O Street, I got a good view of Lincoln Lutheran

Once we left Lincoln we headed to Nebraska City. I had lots of questions for the pilot, but my headset wasn’t very good, so after a few failed attempts, I just sat back and enjoyed the scenery. When we got to Nebraska City, not only was Highway 2 closed into Iowa, but I-29 was closed as well.

Sooo much water, and there are lots of places in Nebraska that are worse off than this. Best not to dwell on that. The trip back was a little quieter. Curt got to fly the plane for a little bit.

The landing was pretty rough, and our pilot really wasn’t satisfied with it. So he said, “It looks like we have about 10 minutes left. Do you want to try that landing again?” We all agreed so we did the riskiest parts one more time. This time the landing was as smooth as silk.

 

New Marxhausen Show

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Lauren’s asleep, so I can post now. Some of you have seen some of these pictures on the Social Medias. My hobby now is putting art shows together. It’s very rewarding and I highly recommend it. So far we have raised about 60k from the sale of the art that the Marxhausen family donated to the Child Development Center and to the Center for Liturgical Arts. Previously these were separate en devours, but our forces have been combined now.

Anyway, the current show is centered around the liturgical art pieces that we have.
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But we’re displaying some of the pieces from previous shows in The Vault. It’s literally a vault.

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I looked for older posts that I could link to that talked about this, but I guess I we never wrote any. that’s a little strange. Maybe I just can’t find them. If you’re interested, there are some press releases that you can read, and you can also see the art online. Or, if you had any questions, you could just ask.

Eclipsed

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We had a good eclipse day at Lincoln Lutheran. I had my tech crew kids make some really big pin-hole cameras (or, as we like to call them, camerae obscura) over the past few days. We had some boxes that were 2 x 2 x 6, so you could fit two people’s heads into them (or one person with two heads, I guess). About 50 people got to use the boxes.

We didn’t spend a lot of time outside. Maybe 40 minutes total. It was a little cloudy, but you could still see what was going on, and totality was awesome. Lots of parents showed up. We had blankets, folding chairs, an outdoor speaker system with music, and at least one welding helmet.

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We got the welding helmet about 22 years ago at a surplus store in Maryland. It has seen use on at least two occasions for Hat Day at school, but other than that, it has been quietly biding its time in the basement, storing up spiders and waiting for an eclipse. Well done, welding helmet. Well done.

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Oh, and I changed our bell tone for between classes to 15 seconds of Total Eclipse of the Heart. I don’t know if any of the students knew the song, but all of the teachers groaned.

Ready for the zombies

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I was driving to the computer store to pick-up some iPads for Lincoln Lutheran students, when traffic came to a stand still. I was right at an intersection, so I thought I would just make a little jog to bypass whatever craziness was taking place ahead of me.

I went about a block and came to this house:

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They are clearly working on their preparations for the Zombie Apocalypse, and who can blame them. I was impressed with their efforts thus far.  They are not yet completely around the house, but the stack is about 6 feet thick, so you could walk around on the top and pick zombies off without being in any danger of falling off the wall.

Also, I may have been playing too many zombie games this summer.  Also, there have been other posts about zombies.

ISTE Road Trip Play List

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Let me just start this post off by admitting that I don’t know if the title should be 5 words, 4 words or 3 words. Lauren is asleep already, so I can’t ask her.

The International Society for Technology in Education conference is coming up in a little over 3 weeks. It’s in San Antonio and I’m bringing 5 other teachers from Lincoln Lutheran. They decided that they would rather drive than fly. I didn’t really care, because the cost was the same either way. But this way I get to make a play list.

In my high school classes I will frequently play music from my phone when students are all working on projects. When I do that, each student gets a veto. They can veto any one song that they don’t like each class period. Eventually they ask if they can veto someone else’s veto and I tell them about the great veto war of ought six…

I explain that Lauren teaches preschool and one year they were learning about the ocean (this was before Lauren became crazy). She put blue paper over the florescent lights and purchased a CD of whale song. Whales can sing for a long time. When one of the whale songs came up in class every veto was used and we ended up listening to 30 minutes of whales.

I thought we could do something like that on the road trip. The play list stands at 399 songs right now. 24 hours and 28 minutes. Almost enough to get us there and back (not figuring in 130 vetos). The hardest things about adding to the list now are (a) dragging songs around to get them in a reasonable order and (b) remembering what songs are in the list when I try to add more. With the last batch that I added I had to go back and delete 12 songs that I had forgotten were in the list.

Here’s the playlist. I don’t know if you can see it without a Spotify account. Let me know.