science fair, gardening, computer woes

We had our Science Fair on Saturday. It was organized by a small homeschooling group that mainly just meets for playgroups. I don't do much with the group but when I saw they were doing the science fair I signed us up. We tried to dye these carnations with food coloring but after waiting about 2 weeks they only had tiny bits of the colors they were supposed to change to. I'm still not sure what we did wrong. I was thinking that maybe the girls woldn't want to do the science fair since the project didn't work. Probably that was just my way of trying to get out of it! But they really wanted to finish the project, make a display board and go to the fair. I am glad we did. When I first asked Ellen what she learned from the experiment she said, "some expirements don't work." I got a kick out of that and we talked about how that it is probably a big part of scientists life having to figure out why things work and don't work. Ellen drew a great picture of a flower, rain and roots absorbing. Then Arianna traced over my writing for a title that they came up with and Ellen wrote one sentence about the flowers absorbing water from soil. It was a big success even though not how we thought it would be. The fair was very well organized and they even handed out certificates to all the participants (about 20). Daniel and his father were able to come and watch and we were all very proud. The girls even had to announce to everyone their age and name.



The main reason for William's visit was to help in the garden. He came down early Saturday morning with his little honda loaded down with bags of organic compost and fertilizer for us. Then he spent the morning helping us dig and get the beds ready. We were all outside and it ended up being a beautiful day.

There was one very frustrating thing that was going on the whole weekend--our computer malfunctions!!!! Our mac that we bought right before going to grad school has been slowly giving us hints that something is wrong. For some reason it seemed to start on my side and so i just left it and moved all my work to this hand-me-down PC from mom. But we couldn't avoid the problems any longer so we started really trying to figure it all out. Once we started digging into the problem it seemed that things just got worse. Now after hours of laboring over the machine (mostly Daniel doing this work) we are sure it needs a new hardrive. It's a little scary since we both have tons of music and PICTURES on the mac and there's still about 600 left that I couldn't transfer. Thankfully we have a warranty through apple so they will replace the hard drive for us but. . . we have had long talks about the problems of technology, lots of moments of complete frustration and tons of idle time sitting watching the "beachball" (kinda like the hourglass you get with the PC) just spinning! Okay, enough complaining, at least we are fortunate enough to have a computer and we don't have to spend money on it. We are seriously considering getting a back up hard drive in case this happens again and I would suggest that you do the same thing!