Stormy End of Summer

 This has been such a stormy few weeks. We're used to having monsoons in July and August, but usually most of them provide dry lightning and a little cloud cover and not much else. This year, it started raining in mid-August and has rained nearly every day.

 One afternoon after a particularly hard downpour, we were treated to a double rainbow. The kids, their friends, and I ran outside to enjoy it.

 Then came the best part for them: jumping in puddles!

 They ran and jumped, splashed, and repeated. It was warm enough that they didn't care if they got a little (or a lot) wet.

 Desert Girl really wanted to go touch the rainbow. I tried to get creative about where the rainbow ended, but it didn't end up quite like I wanted. Nevertheless, it was sure beautiful!

 We decided to go for a walk, and the kids were on a mission to find every puddle they could.

 Some of the puddles were nice and deep, allowing for big splashes.

 We don't get to enjoy puddles out here in the desert too often, so this was a wonderful treat. It didn't hurt that mud was involved!

 I was wondering if we would see any flash flooding, but the ground did a pretty good job of absorbing most of the rain. After two drier than normal years, the ground is thirsty!

 I couldn't resist a photo of the old time wagon and barn. It always looks so neat, but if I had to use it all the time, I might not think quite the same.

 The rainbow stuck around for a long time, gracing us with its beauty.

Life is good with a friend and a puddle and the freedom to run wherever you want!

Our Little Solar System

I'm a big fan of road art, and I had an idea in the early summer of a fun road art project. But it was hard to get the time, energy, and materials needed to implement it. I gave myself a deadline: it needed to be up before the Great Basin National Park Astronomy Festival on September 5-7. And fortunately it's up! Here's the newest road art on the park road.

The solar system has arrived! We begin with the sun (which later blew over so is now oriented slightly differently.)


Mercury, the closest planet to the sun. My helpers were enthusiastic for the inner planets.


Venus, our nearby neighbor. Wow, it looks small!

Go, Earth!

Oops, Mars is a little blurry. Must be a telescope error.

Intermission to drill holes in the boards!

What's after Mars? Well, we did put up Jupiter, but then we came back and put up five dwarf planets, including Ceres, which is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.



Then comes Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system!

Saturn, Desert Girl's favorite planet. Our Saturn keeps losing its ring, though.

It's a long way to the next planet, Uranus (which should be bluish, but I had lost energy by this time, so if anyone wants to paint it blue, go for it!).

And what's the last planet in our solar system?

Neptune! (which should also be bluish)

But wait, what about Pluto? Most of us were taught that we have nine planets in our solar system. Those days are gone. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union came up with a definition of planets, and Pluto just didn't meet it. So now it's a dwarf planet.

 

Little Pluto, a cold rocky planet far, far away.

The good thing about Pluto becoming a dwarf planet is that we also got a few more dwarf planets, with more probably to be discovered.

Meet dwarf planet Haumea (which is slightly oversized in the model, but we had run out of little, tiny balls).

And here's Makemake (which we have a lot of fun pronouncing).


Finally there's Eris, the largest of the dwarf planets. (And maybe the hardest to find in our little solar system, since we had to switch to a different fence.)

To space these planets, I found Dr. Jerry Galloway's website that had both a 100 foot backyard model and also a four-mile model. I made adjustments to make it about two miles long. It was a nine-planet based system, so then I looked for information about the dwarf planets and fitted them in. They might not be exact, but neither are their orbits. Several of the planets and dwarf planets change order depending on where they are in their orbit (for example, Neptune and Pluto).

Here are the distances if you're interested, along with diameter sizes scaled for a four-mile long course (I chose to make my planet diameters not to scale, as I wanted them to be visible while driving 60 mph along the road, but wanted to give you an idea in case you want to make your own solar system model):

Astronomical body	distance	diameter (inches)
Sun	0	60
Mercury	105 feet	0.2
Venus	185 feet	0.5
Earth	271 feet	0.6
Mars	413 feet	0.3
Ceres*	~600 feet	<.1
Jupiter	¼ mile	6.2
Saturn	½ mile	5.2
Uranus	1 mile	2.2
Neptune	1 ½ mile	2.2
Pluto*	2 mile	0.1
Haumea*	2.1 mile	<.1
Makemake*	2.2 mile	<.1
Eris*	2.5 mile	0.1
*dwarf planet

Running or biking on the park road will now have some new landmarks--can you make it to Jupiter in ten minutes? How about Uranus?

I consider the road art as community art, so anyone who would like to improve on the art (for example, making better planets or a ring that will stay on Saturn) or add to it (e.g., asteroid belt, other celestial objects) is welcome!

The State Quarters Games

When I was a kid, I had a penny and nickel collection. I had a lot of fun looking for coins with dates to fill in the missing slots in my coin collection book. 

Then I got older and needed every nickel and dime to pay for grad school. I didn't pay attention to any coins except how they paid for my tuition, room, food, and books.

Fast forward to working, starting a family, and other hobbies. Coin collecting didn't fit in my schedule.

I didn't totally ignore our currency. I remember hearing about the state quarters, but figured that was a clever gimmick to get a lot of quarters out of circulation, and I just wasn't interested. 

However, now I've had a change of mind. It occurred to me that the state quarters would be a great way for Desert Boy to learn some geography. So we sorted through our change bowl and pulled out the state quarters.

 Oh my goodness, that writing and those images on the quarters sure are small! We pulled out a magnifying glass to get a better look.

 Of course Desert Girl wanted in on the action. Her first job was to sort the eagle quarters from all the other quarters. She did a fine job of that.

Then Desert Boy started looking at the quarters and finding where they belonged. We used our game board from Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego (a wonderful thrift store find at $1!), but any large USA map would do.

 After we had gone through our change bowl, we found that we had quarters for 24 states.

I looked up some information about the state quarters and found it fascinating. The U.S. Mint issued the 50 state quarters from 1999 to 2008, with five a year. They made varying numbers of quarters, from 416,000 for Oklahoma up to 1.59 million for Virginia. The U.S. Treasury was against the project, citing the "Disneyfication" of the currency. But it's estimated that nearly half of U.S. citizens collected the quarters, with $3 billion made in profit, due to coins taken out of circulation (Wikipedia).

The quarters were issued in the order that the states ratified the constitution, and you can see illustrations of them all on Wikipedia.

As we were going through the quarters, I noted one from Puerto Rico. What? That's not a state! It turns out that after the 50 states, quarters were issued for the District of Columbia and the U.S. Territories: Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Northern Mariana Islands. We don't even think about the territories much, so these quarters (which were issued in relatively small numbers) are a little reminder of where U.S. money is going (and perhaps where you should plan a vacation if you don't want to get a passport?).

We also found some quarters with places like Mount Hood, Chickisaw, Gettysburg, and my favorite, Great Basin. These are part of the America the Beautiful quarters, which started in 2010 and issues five quarters a year, one of a beautiful place (often a national park) in each state or territory.

You can find out more about all these programs, plus access curriculums at the U.S. Mint website.

In the meantime, we raided a piggybank and found even more state quarters, so we're now up to 45. Desert Boy can't wait to find the Texas quarter. And he knows where on the map it goes.

We like to play different games with the state quarters.

1. Race to put five quarters on the map. (2 to 10 players) Each player gets five quarters, and then when the time starts, puts the quarters on the correct state as fast as possible. First player wins.

2. Locate the state in order of joining the U.S. (one or multiple players, one person to read the order).  Using information from the Wikipedia website, have the player(s) find the states in the order they ratified the Constitution, picking up the quarters as they find them. Do you know which was first? (Hint: this state quarter has Caesar Rodney on it.)

3. Locate the states in alphabetical order. (one or multiple players, one person to read the order).
Using information from the U.S. Mint website, have the player(s) find the states in alphabetical order, picking up the quarters as they find them.

4. Find how many state quarters have horses on them. Or airplanes. Or ships. Or flowers. Or birds. Or words in other languages. Or people. Or outlines of states. Or their state nicknames. Or their state mottoes. This is a great game to really look at the different quarter designs and study them.

5. Pick your favorite quarter design and explain why you like it! Everyone is a winner in this game!

If you'd like to play some more games, the U.S. Mint has a game page!

Putting Up Hay During Monsoon Season

 The past few weeks have been the stormiest weeks I can remember in the desert, with thunderstorms almost every day. All us desert denizens have had to make some adjustments to deal with the elevated humidity and strange stuff falling out of the sky! It's really nice not to have so much dust on our gravel roads, and Desert Girl absolutely loves jumping in all the puddles. However, trying to harvest the third crop of alfalfa has been a little tricky. (If you'd like to learn how many crops of alfalfa we grow a year, how long this plant can grow, and how it's harvested, check out this post.)

 My husband is flipping some of the hay to check the moisture content. It has to be quite dry in order to put into bales, otherwise it will get moldy.

Do you notice a darker cloud in the background? It's a smoke column from one of the many wildfires the lightning has started. As we continued with monsoons, we got enough rain that the fires have dwindled--it's wet enough that the little fires are put out, often before they are even noticed.

My husband's allergic to hay, so he likes to shower soon after checking hay. The ragweed is usually really bad this time of year, but the wetness has made it a little better this year.

In the meantime, we're looking for a dry window to get the hay put up while it still has a higher protein content and is worth more. It seems ironic to be wishing for a little dryness out in a place that gets less than seven inches of precipitation a year! Any farmer will tell you, though, timing is everything. Well, they'll probably tell you a lot more than that. Farmers know a lot about the land and the weather!

Our Newest Pet

 We have a new pet. Desert Girl is the instigator. How can I resist when she asks for a new pet?

 This time around it's a "caterpilly." Or rather, two of them (although only photographed above).

When we explained to Desert Girl that her pets had been eating our corn, she started calling them "bad caterpillies." It was pretty funny.

This "caterpilly" is a corn earworm. Fortunately quite harmless (to hold, not so great for crops). Some caterpillars can give you quite a rash just touching them.

Most likely these pets won't last too long, but I love how Desert Girl is so excited about exploring the natural world around her.

What's your favorite non-traditional pet?