Piano playing

Kris takes piano lessons, Karen is taking a piano class at Bradley, and now it looks like Bugs is in on it. By the way, Karen has now created a Facebook account for me.

Canning Weekend

Saturday we converted our accumulated blackberries (mostly), black and red raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries (just a few) to three and a half batches of what we simply call "berry jelly". It tastes good. I was able extract more color from the berry sludge after the jelly making and plan to use the purple solution for acid-base indicator demos. Today we converted a grocery bag of frozen tomatoes from our garden into just three pints of tomato sauce.

Dean

New LEGO model

For years I have occasionally tinkered with the idea of adding a "buckyball" to the array of LEGO models of molecules that I have been involved in developing. I felt it would make a nice complement to the diamond structure https://pobox.bradley.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://mrsec.wisc.edu/Edetc/LEGO/PDFfiles/UCinstruct/diamondwhole.PDF and graphite structure http://mrsec.wisc.edu/Edetc/LEGO/PDFfiles/UCinstruct/graphite_whole.PDF.

Others have built the structure using very unorthodox LEGO pieces, but I was going for basic blocks. This I have viewed, if nothing else, as a good challenge. (It’s kind of like the game “Jenga” with LEGO bricks.) A couple nights ago I got to thinking about it again and hit upon a new approach. The result is not a perfect sphere and it’s not the strongest structure (especially when the support rods are removed), but it does feature the appropriate number and pattern of hexagons and pentagons.

November Oak Leaves

Stopped by Lauterbach Park in Bartonville for a little while this morning. No luck fossil hunting in such a short time, but I took some pix that I like. This afternoon we raked (hopefully for the last time) and I put up the icicle lights on the house. I hope I will not be accused of contributing to "Christmas creep" as columnist Gregg Easterbrook likes to talk about, but we do not plan to light the lights much until after Thanksgiving.

By the way, my wife, Karen Campbell, now has an page on Facebook. Look her up sometime!

Visit to Springfield

I had a meeting at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield today. It's not bad for a free museum, and the Illinois fossil collection is pretty good. It is very close to the capitol building. I'm including a picture in case our governor has forgotten what it looks like. The gas prices continue to drop - see the picture.

The weather has been overcast and cold and most of the leaves have dropped. We have had flurries, but nothing has stuck. What a contrast to last weekend - November is definitely here!

The REO Speedwagon concert is on PBS again - I feel old again - but I still like it.

Show yesterday

In addition to the big election yesterday, we did an early and fast demo show at a local elementary school for roughly 400 kids. I have a soft spot for this school, because it's in a not so great neighborhood. The day before we did some demos for a group of visiting Russian high school students - working through a translator was interesting. So much has changed since the days of the cold war, and of course some things still need to change.

Beautiful fall day

We had pretty warm weather considering if was November 1. We enjoyed the leaves, Kris played at a fall festival at Peoria Christian School, and we roasted hotdogs on a bonfire tonight.