Elser Family Blog

Christmas Crash

I got the chance to ride the greeneway with a friend. I guess I was a little excited, because I was not paying the attention I know I should at the treacherous wood bridge.. (that bridge has gotten me twice before while I was running). It was in the morning before the sun burned off the dew, and the bridge was slick.. the front wheel went right out on me, and I was in clipless shoes. I was more mad than hurt though… Mad that I allowed it to happen, and SUPER mad that I was not wearing gloves! That said, I’m 51, and I got up and all that was wrong was I was missing a bunch of skin. I even finished the ride, along with a couple PR times! 🙂
Here is the leg.. but my palm was the worst for it… arrg.

But Hey, I did 14 more miles after the crash, so it must not have been that bad.

Aluminum and water beads

After making sculptures with Ant hills, we stumbled across this one.. pouring aluminum into water beads! Works surprisingly well.

Pretty!

And here is the process:

Sugar season, a cache, and an anachronism.

Arthur Shealy invited us to crush some sugar cane again this year! I drug Dale with me.

Starting the boiling process. I swear Arthur, if you allow that cane juice into the pot without being finely strained one more time….

The kids seem to like going geocaching… at night. Here is one in the woods.

Rockwell played “Joe” in the Christmas play this year. “youre WHAT??” the funniest line of the night.

Rockwell also played with the high schoolers at the North Augusta Christmas tree lighting.

Rockwell found a friend. She was trying to convince him to attend NAHS, and join band.

Can you spot the anachronisms? I see three of them! They all still work too!

Don Trump Rally today!

The girls wanted to go to a Trump rally in Aiken today. No doubt he has some support in Aiken! LOTS of people there to support him.

Melinda, mid reaction to something he said.. too funny!

My favorite sign of the whole rally. There were a couple groups of people that caused a fuss, but nothing major, AND Trump actually said; “I dont mind the protesters.. we all should be protesting more!”. That response supried me a tad.

The girls got bored half way through and decided to join a small contingent of “protesters” out front. I love the guy dressed like a communist! My favorite chant was them saying the pledge of allegiance to the flag, and at the end repeating “And liberty and justice for all! And liberty and justice for all!”

Random Activities. Lasers and Ants.

Hannah and I stole and idea off the internet, Melted some aluminum, and poured it into a Anthill. We did not think it even worked, until we pulled this out the ground!

Here is the setup before firing..

Ready to pour!

Melinda is working on her science fair project. She is measuring the fringes of a interference pattern in order to figure out the wavelength of light. The calculation is actually quite basic: wavelength = fringe distance*double split spacing/distance between measurement of fringe and the split. We did the math… and it worked perfect, first time out. That was actually pretty exciting. She has three different colored Lasers to measure.