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We saw four geese… and first snow!

We saw four geese on our property the other day!  Maybe we should tell them they are late in flying south  :)

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Here are a few facts on geese.

  • Geese are a type of waterfowl belonging to the group of Anserini.
  • Geese mostly eat greens vegetation and grains.
  • There are three kinds of true geese gray geese, white geese ,and black geese.

Some Geese do amazing things while they are migrating.  There is a species in Asia, Bar-headed Geese (Aner indicus), that migrate over the tallest mountain in the world (can you guess?) in the Himalayan Mountains.  The air temperature is as low as -60 Degrees F.

Now that is a “wow”.

References:

  1. Wikipedia contributors, “Goose,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Goose&oldid=633827032 (accessed November 19, 2014).
  2. “Migrating Geese”, Chipper Woods Bird Observatory, http://www.wbu.com/chipperwoods/photos/geese.htm (accessed November 19, 2014)
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Old hand forged nails

We have some old hand forged nails. The nails were made by a blacksmith.

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We polished them with a Dremel tool using a wire brush.  Did you know that a Dremel tool can spin 500 times per second?  Wow.  We wore safety glasses to protect our eyes.

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Here is a polished nail.

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Here are some facts on old nails.

  • Old nails were once so valuable that when a building burnt or fell down people went through with magnets to find the nails and save them.
  • Nails provide one of the best clues to help determine the age of historic buildings, especially those constructed during the nineteenth century.
  • Between the 1790s and the early 1800s, various machines were invented in the United States for making nails from bars of iron.

 

Here is the a chart for nails. (Copyright Thomas Visser)

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You can read more about it here: http://www.uvm.edu/histpres/203/nails.html

That is all for now!

 

References:

 

 

 

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Our Cats

We got two kittens in the beginning of summer, but  they are teenager-cats now.

This is Shadow, who is a very good hunter.  She only likes to go to places her sister has already explored.

This is Shadow holding a chipmunk that she caught!

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This is Patches, she is the explorer. When we first got the kittens, Patches explored the house. I guess that after a while Patches must have told Shadow that it was safe because Shadow started going with her everywhere.

This is Patches exploring our brush pile.

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That’s all for now!

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We found a big spider

Here is a big spider that we found while raking leaves today.

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Spiders are air-breathing arthropods.  They are found in every continent except Antarctica.

Spiders mostly prey on bugs, but few large species prey on large birds and lizards.  Argh, that is scary!

To find out more about spiders click here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider

That’s all for now.

 

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Programming

Hi, this is Eli.  One of our school assignments is to completely learn our math tables by heart.   We wrote a python program to help us practice with this.  This is a program for multiplication tables 1-12.

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Ezra and I are learning how to program in python.  Dad helped us get the structure of this program right, but we entered into IDLE and debugged it ourselves.

Here is an example of the program in action:

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When you activate the program it  asks you how many problems you want – you can go from 1 to 144 problems.

When you are done with your problems it tells you how long you took and how many problems you got right and how many problems you got right and how long it took you to answer each problem.

That’s all for now!