Bree’s drawing of a treehouse that might have been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright
Angela spends the morning downtown gathering signatures for Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign. The volunteers hit their quota toward getting enough signatures to have Yang included on the ballot in Washington State.
Nothing to see here, just a girl doing homework wearing a penguin costume.
“I was cold, and this is warm,” she says.
Anya is working late in the evening on an assignment for her computer science class. The class has been writing programs in the Python language to draw fractal, a type of complex mathematical construct often rendered in trippy graphics. Each student has to pick an interesting fractal, and write a program to draw that fractal.
For the project, Anya has decided to write a program to draw an obscure type of fractal called a Lyupanov fractal. The information available online about Lyupanov fractals is scant. Jan finds an old Scientific American column from the 90s about the topic. Using the old column and a Wikpedia article, Anya and Jan work out the basics of what she needs to do.
Anya and Jan spend the evening texting back and forth, with Jan trying to spot bugs in Anya’s code. Jan eventually observes that it’s late in Seattle, and therefore after midnight in Connecticut. “You should go to bed,” he writes. Anya replies: “I will not.”
Eventually Anya gets her program working, and it produces a trippy picture as desired.
Liya’s cross-country team heads in two school buses to Pasco, WA, for the state championships the following day.
To cheer on Liya and her team, Angela, Jan, Bree, and Lyn drive separately. We stop for dinner in Yakima. Our drinks come with coasters. While waiting for our food to arrive, Angela shows Bree how to one can set the coaster on the edge of the table, flip it up with the back of one’s hand, then try to catch it. This game amuses Bree.
Liya’s cross-country team is strong for the Seattle area, but not at the state level, so the team isn’t not expecting to place in the final standings. Still, Liya runs a great race, and ends up being the first girl on her team across the finish line.
(In photo, Liya’s in the middle row at the far left.)
On the way back from Eastern Washington, we drive up the pretty Yakima River and stop for a short walk up Umtanum Creek. The fishing must be good — there are plenty of fishermen casting in the river.
During a family dinner conversation, Angela notes that Liya’s upcoming SAT test falls on December 7, which happens to be Jan’s birthday.
Angela: “Daddy would like you to get a good SAT score as his birthday present, so you should study hard.”
Jan: “Uh, I don’t know if—”
Liya: “No, Daddy is the one who would say that SAT studying shouldn’t overshadow other, more important aspects of life, such as friendship.”
Bree attends her first school dance, then spends the night with a bunch of her classmates at her friend Elsa’s house. Elsa’s mom reports that the girls had a good time.
Anya’s wanted to play in a Quiz Bowl — a quiz-based competition testing knowledge across a wide range of subjects — so she’s created a Quiz Bowl club at Choate. Having secured club status and enlisted a number of other students, she organizes the club’s first competitive showing at a Quiz Bowl event in Boston. The Choate teams do well enough to qualify for nationals, and Anya individually places 15 out of the 60+ high school students at the event.
Bree’s school holds its annual Engineering Event. This year’s theme is robot dogs. Bree and her classmates make a number of contraptions from cardboard, plastic pneumatic tubes, and other things. One of the contraptions is a rubber band-powered dog on wheels. When it comes time to send hers across the floor, Bree’s goes backward — she laughs when she realizes she wound the rubber band the wrong way.
Her most elaborate construction is a cardboard dog she built at home. She attached little dog legs to the wheels so that it would look like the dog was running. She studied our cats to work out which directions the front and back legs should bend.
Bree gets glasses. She’s mildly nearsighted, so the glasses should help her read what’s written on a whiteboard at the front of a classroom.
Jan has worn reading glasses for a number of years now, and Angela’s trying out progressive lenses herself. This leaves Liya as the sole person in the house who doesn’t need any kind of corrective eyewear.
The weather over Thanksgiving looks like it’ll get below freezing, so before we pack up or car to leave, Bree and Jan get in the kiwi harvest. It’s another bumper crop, which means we’ll once again end up throwing half of it away.
We drive to Suncadia in eastern Washington, where we’ll spend Thanksgiving with Skye’s family, Chris, and Lyn. It’s a beautiful, clear day, but the temperature is quite cold. We have lunch at the Basecamp Cafe in Roslyn, then spend the rest of the day in the house we’re renting. Auden and Leif enjoy spending time with their Uncle Chris.
Happy Thanksgiving!
After dinner, we go outside to launch Leif’s plastic bottle rocket, which is powered by baking soda and vinegar. Leif is very excited, and plays air guitar while improvising a song about the rocket launch. On the first launch, the rocket spews foaming vinegar all over Jared’s hand. The second launch is a little better, but still only goes up about 25 feet.
This year the crew responsible for making ice box pudding constructed an enormous castle. There’s also a pecan pie, and Chris bakes a tasty apple pie.
Skye and Auden. The pond behind them is frozen over. We throw rocks onto the pond, and the rocks make odd pinging sounds as they skip over the ice.
We pack up in the morning and make our preparations to return to our various homes. On the way out of Suncadia, we make one last stop for coffee at Basecamp Books. We snap a group photo before driving off.