Lego Robotics Competition

We spent this weekend in Idaho Falls for Miles' First Lego Robotic League competition. They all did a great job and they took 2nd place (out of 30 teams) on their presentation. They did really well with the robotics challenge as well.

Here are a couple of clips of their robotic challenges:

Here are the champtions!

Major Progress

Our amazing circuit box. We have a circuit for everything. Laird did the complicated weaving here. You should have seen it when it was just a mass of disorganized wires!

The wires for the network box that Eric did. Don’t worry it looked all orderly before it was covered with the foam insulation.

Foam insulation in the laundry room.

Foam insulation in the family room. Here they put a cloth over the studs and then filled the space with foam.

 

Hey, does this photo look familiar to all you anagram fans?

 

We got the insulation in the ceiling of the family room and the downstairs bedroom. We hope this makes it more possible for Eric and I to live with our teenagers.

Hooray! Walls! This is the family room and the very odd wall of closets in the “office.”

Gee, I hope they have enough drywall mud to do all the patching!

Patching and a strange little box on the ceiling of the downstairs bathroom. (It covers the upstairs sewer pipes.)

Unidentified Object Anagrams

 

LACTICREEL WISER	ATWER NAIM
CARNOSY	LAKEY GETRUT
DRLWALY CHAPT	TRADEHEEHAW
MAOF LIASONNUT	AIRGUT BEDRIG
SOVIETPI TTES	GREYPIN MASTIN

        

Passover 2008

Okay, it’s been awhile since Passover 2008, but since I’m in charge of Eric’s blog now, I’m going to revisit days gone by. Sitting at my parents house one day, back when John and Emily lived in town. (We miss you!), I mentioned something about doing a Passover again. Now, if you know John, you don’t just casually mention something without intentions to follow through. So the next thing we knew we were planning a Passover seder.

So I dug out the Haggadah I wrote up several years ago, and we unpacked the plastic “wine” glasses and started getting ready for Passover. I admit, we did not completely clear the house of hametz, nor did we burn the last crumbs. But we did clean up and vaccum.  

Matzo, maror (bitter herbs- horseradish and romaine), karpas, salt water, the Four Questions and Elijah’s cup. We pretty much has a traditional Jewish seder with a few Christian side notes thrown in. And we did actually eat roasted lamb which I guess is not traditional, (at least not since 70 A.D when the temple was destroyed.)

Old News

Since Eric has given up on his blog lately, I thought I (Melinda) would fill in a few details. Miles is teaching me the intricacies of posting pictures. These are old pictures, but if you don’t live nearby they’ll be new to you.

We’ve gotten a lot of use out of Dad’s sawzall. The wall from the kitchen to the bathroom is one wall that is now gone. In this picture part of the wall was still there, but now it is gone.

 

Our ghost-like furniture. Today Dad and Nielson moved the couches and exercise bike up to my parents house. Amazingly they were fairly protected from the inches of dust. Notice the holes in the walls and ceiling. There are holes in every wall now. (Except, of course, the walls that aren’t there.)

In this corner between the reading room and my bedroom, a few more walls came out. This picture is looking from the reading room through what used to be the door-to-nowhere. You can see the bathroom straight ahead. The first time Ian walked into the gutted bathroom he looked around confused and asked, “Now, what room was this again?”

These kitchen cabinets hold some of the few things I did not pack away. It’s so nice I got to leave a few things where they were.

From my room looking into the corner of the reading room, down the hall and into the kitchen.

 

From the other direction, looking from the missing hall wall into my bedroom.

 

Eric and his consultant and helpers did a good job with the plumbing in the bathroom. This is after they moved the toilet the first time. (The toilet is that black pipe on the floor.) On Saturday they moved the toilet slightly to the south to accommodate Eric’s gigantic tub. They also replaced that cast-iron plumbing vent stack on Saturday. I hear the shower head is about seven feet up. So if you visit us, know that this is a bathroom built for a giant.