It's Locker Day!

I have the greatest friends.

I finally quit procrastinating and emailed about the lockers. Two friends responded almost immediately and said "lets do it TONIGHT!"

So I'll order pizza for dinner for all of us and for our GREAT friends, and have iliacat make some brownies or something, and we'll get it done!

here's one last look at the lockers before, to give you that "man, they need to get OUT of there" feeling that I have every day.

In other news, Gark has an assignment in his schooly stuff to look at some pond water under a microscope. Which he was quite interested in. So we hauled out The Grand Lunar's Sister's Old Microscope, and dusted off the Old Digital Microscope, and even borrowed Moogies Old Microscope hoping for a glimpse of a paramecium or amoeba.

So far we've seen dead blobs of pond weed, and we've seen some scooting around tiny dots.

So far we've only been able to get a good focus at 100x on one old microscope, and the 200X on the digital works great but we haven't seen any little swimmies. the old microscopes have the potential of 300x, 400x, and I think even 600x if we can get the lenses cleaned off and the light source adjusted right.

But in the meantime, I surfed around and found that you can increase the number of little creatures in your pond water (usually you're lucky to see 1 or 2 in a drop, from what I read) by incubating them in happy pond goo. You can make your own growth mediums by boiling water and adding timothy hay (I substituted alfalfa, hope that's close enough) or some wheat grains (good thing I have them sitting around not being ground) or rice grains, or a little egg yolk, or dried milk, or yeast! So I boiled a bunch of water and made up 6 jars for each of the different solutions, and then we'll add pond water to make two solutions per jar, after the jars sit and percolate for awhile. Some you incubate immediately, some you wait. Apparently different little critters grow best in different cultures.

Soooo .... for your viewing pleasure: Pond Culture E1, with it's parent collections of Pond Water 1 (from near the surface) and Pond Water 2 (from near the bottom). E1 (and it's friend, E2) is the dried milk 'host' culture, and was the only one to be incubated immediately after mixing.

by the end of the weekend I'll have 12 jars of pond scum cultures, and hopefully some reports (and perhaps a digital picture or two) of the creatures we'll hopefully see. I hope.

In other-other news, little Buzz, who appears to be my accident-prone child, hurt his wrist today. He's asked to have ice on it and has sat still watching videos, crying when he tries to move it. For the moment we're taking a wait and see approach, since his last two injuries resolved themselves after a little rest and relaxation and babying. But if you could pray for wisdom for us and healing for him, I'd feel better. There's no swelling or discoloring, but his protecting it has lasted more than one video ...