Movie Day: Alvin and the Chipmunks Chipwrecked

King's take:
We saw Alvin and the Chipmunks Chipwrecked.
I think it was good except for the volcano part. The volcano was about to erupt.
No one was helping. Only Brittany and Alvin were trying to build a shelter.
Simon got bit by a spider which made him think he was a French guy Simòn.
Zoe was obsessed with the treasure and caught Jeanette by a rope and wanted to get more treasures.
My favorite scene was when the Chipmunks and the Chipettes helped build a raft. Simon and Jeanette were missing and not on the raft.
(The rest of the review is video-recorded, though the sound is actually very soft, as my computer's basic mic was simply too far away to catch as much sound as I would have liked.)
Video Review

Miaka's take:
Today we went to see a movie King chose, Alvin and the Chipmunks Chipwrecked, which is the latest movie in that series. I must honestly admit that I was not really looking forward to this movie. The difference in ages between King and myself means that I'm old enough to remember the Saturday-morning cartoon Alvin and the Chipmunks, while he is not. I don't really care for the whole live-action and CG thing, and I tend to appreciate Alvin & co better in small doses. King wanted to see it though, so we went. It was actually better than I expected, though I must admit I wasn't expecting much.
We arrived at the theater in plenty of time for the show, planning to go to the 12:10pm showing. Upon reaching the front of the ticket line, however, we were told that there were only 3 tickets left for that show, and the cashier recommended we attended the 12:20 showing instead. King decided he was fine with that and bought the tickets, after which we headed over to the concessions counter to pick up popcorn and drinks. Once we had our goodies, I decided to go sit at a table for a moment while I sorted myself out again and gave my husband at heads-up that we were attending a later show. Of course, I then decided while waiting for him to pick up the phone that we really ought to be in line... so we went up to enter the theater proper while I was on the phone and juggling snacks, drinks, and purse. Fortunately, nothing got spilled and everyone was willing to be patient with us for a moment while we found our tickets and then our way.
Once in the actual theater, it took a bit to find seats, and we ended up in the second row, the seats just behind the wheelchair-parking section (meaning there wasn't anyone in front of us). We settled in and took off our jackets, careful not to take up more space than we needed, as the show was nearly if not entirely sold-out. I don't think I've been in a theater that full for quite some time, but I suppose that's to be expected with a kids' movie matinee during school vacation.
The movie, as I mentioned before, was better than I had thought it would be. I found it rather amusing to watch Simon and Alvin effectively swap personalities. However, I still think I liked them better as cartoons.
After the movie, Archi picked us up and we headed back to my place, chattering the whole way. I think we may have confused Archi a bit, since he hadn't seen any of the movies, and like me, was familiar only with the cartoon from when we were little, back in the 1980s.
At home, we ordered pizza and then wrote up part of the review, then recorded most of it to put on YouTube. King was initially having trouble deciding if he wanted to do a video review or just write it all down, so we ended up with a little of both. With the review done and lunch eaten, I set him up in front of the TV so he could watch another disc of Magic Knight Rayearth season 2, as he's been clamoring for each week. I made sure everything was working well with the DVD player, then went to another part of the room to work on a sewing project for a bit. He got to watch one full disc before it was time for Dad to pick him up and take him home. I think he had fun. He certainly seemed to enjoy the movie. Let's see what next week brings!

Christmas Cookies!

First off, let me apologize for the delay. Yes, this ought to have gone up yesterday, I know, but I didn't get home at all until late, and then I fell into bed almost as soon as I'd returned home. This morning I was distracted by life in general, but here at last is the record of adventures for yesterday, December the twenty-second.

Thursday, December 22, 2011


King's take:
We made cookies today.
We made cookies and we made cake.
We got all the ingredients first. Then we got the mixer to mix up the cookie dough. We mixed the cookie dough, it was brown. The cookie dough was gingerbread cookie dough. It needed to chill for one hour.
While the cookie dough was chilling, we baked a cake for Baby Jesus. Vanilla cake, in a Bundt pan.
We put the cake in the oven and then we made some chocolate chip cookies for Patch.
We mixed up the dough for chocolate chip cookies and then we added the chocolate chips. We added the whole bag! We stirred it up to mix in the chips. They didn't mix in very well. We had added too many chips! We said "oh well, extra chocolate".
We scooped dough onto a baking sheet. We put 12 on each sheet. Then we put them in the oven.
They cookied 8-10 minutes.
That was about the point I got tired of cooking.
I'm sorry I was tired of cooking.
I'm going to play Bakugan on the Wii for a break.

My take:
Today, the plan is to bake cookies for Christmas! Mom also asked if we could bake the birthday cake for Baby Jesus (a tradition in my family, since everyone else gets a birthday cake).
I had e-mailed Mom a recipie for gingerbread cookies, which I planned on making with King today, and she had all the ingredients (except butter and eggs) out on the island in the kitchen. We got started pretty much right away. I asked King to read off the directions and how much of each ingredient we needed as I did the measuring. Once I had a measured portion, I'd give him the spoon or cup and it would be his job to dump it into the bowl. Putting the cookies together didn't take all that much effort by itself, at least for the first few steps. Of course, we got everything measured out for the second step and then I realized I'd put things in the wrong bowl, as it needed to be mixed with an electric mixer, and Mom only has a stand mixer. (I am the opposite, I have only a hand mixer, and thus don't really have a clear idea how to use a stand mixer.) Well, I dumped everything into the correct bowl for the stand mixer and set it going, King reading directions to me from his seat at the island while I worked. I am not exactly sure why the stand mixer confused me, but it did.
We managed to get the cookies put together, though a lot of  the work was actually just me standing in front of the mixer while talking to King, or singing along with the Christmas music on the CD we'd put in. Once the dough was mixed up, it needed to chill. I asked Patch to come in and help with the cling wrap, because it's tricky and my hands were sticky with dough. Once the dough was in the fridge to chill for an hour (or so), we debated what to do while we waited.
Mom had asked that we also bake the cake, and had the cake mix and Bundt pan all set out and ready to go. Patch asked us to make chocolate chip cookies (apparently he doesn't care for gingerbread?). I told Patch we'd make his cookies if he found the recipie and got everything together for us, then we set to work getting the cake ready, since that had been a previous request, would take longer to cook, and stuff had already been set out for it.
Cake, of course, needed to be made in the stand mixer bowl, so I washed up the dishes from the first batch of cookie dough by hand. Then we set to work putting the cake together. Considering it was a box-mix, this part was simple, and the cake was in the oven in practically no time.
I asked Patch to wash the mixer bowl again, since we'd need it for the chocolate chip cookies as well, and King read through the recipie while Patch cleaned. Apparently, though, I wasn't quite paying attention to all of the bits of recipie information and quantities of items that we had.
We did this batch of cookies much the same way as the last--I'd measure things and King would pour them in, then I'd operate the stand mixer. Then it was time to add the chocolate chips! I sliced the bag open with scissors, then instructed King to dump it in, not paying attention to how big a bag I had, as opposed to how big a bag the recipie actually called for. Upon dumping the bag of chips into the mix, a couple chips got caught in the cut-off part of the top of the bag, and I told King to eat them to make sure the chcolate chips tasted good...only he didn't see where they were! He tried to eat the plastic for a moment, and I giggled and dumped the chips out of their hidng place to hand them to him. He took it all in stride and assured me that the chips were good.
Excellent. Now to mix them into the dough... and the bowl kept trying to get away from me! King held it steady while I stirred and stirred, wondering why on earth the chips weren't mixing in all that well. I shrugged it off, though, and set about getting things ready to bake the cookies, slightly distracted by the cake for a moment when it came out of the oven, looking very tasty.
With the cake set to cool and cookie sheets done up with parchment paper, I pulled out two spoons to start plopping cookies out on the pans. King counted for me, to make sure we had the same number of cookies on each pan--an even dozen. We laughed over the fact that the cookies weren't holding together all that well, and there were a LOT of chocolate chips. Once they went into the oven, we pulled the gingerbread dough out of the fridge.
I handed King the bag of cookie cutters while I made a mess with the flour preparing the island countertop to roll out cookie dough on. With the cookie dough rolled out flat, King would hand me a cookie cutter and I'd place it. Once I had several placed, King would push them all in. This worked well for a few rounds, and then King decided he was tired of cooking and wanted to go play Wii for a while. Not all that suprising, really, since we'd been at this for nearly 4 hours. So I washed my hands and got him set up with the game he wanted to play, asked him for his take on today's adventure, and then went back to the kitchen to finish up the cookies.
It wasn't untill all the cookies were finished baking and set out to cool that Patch really looked at the chocolate chip cookies and complained that they were more chip than cookie...this turned out to be my fault for not reading the package and the directions closely. We'd dumped a 12 ounce bag of chocolate chips into a recipe that called for 6 ounces of chips. No wonder they hadn't mixed in well! Nothing to be done about it, though, the cookies were already baked.

SEE Museum, Manchester NH

December 15, 2011

Miaka's take:
Today, our plan was to visit the SEE Museum (SEE stands for Science Enrichment Encounters) in the Millyard. Getting there was a little interesting as the streets are a touch confusing. A one-way street and a missed turn had us looping around, after we'd already realized that you can't get to the upper parking lot from within the lower parking lot. (The Millyard being built on a hill, there are entrances on both the first and second floor of some of the buildings, especially those on that side of the street. Commercial St is at one level and Bedford Rd, the next street up, is about a story above it. Yes, it's a bit of a steep hill. Most if not all of the buildings in the area date back to at least the 1800s.) We got there eventually, though. Proceeding into the building, we took the elevator up to the 4th floor (yes, I know, you're supposed to use the stairs 'cause it's good exercise and all, but I threw out my back earlier this year and it was acting up).
Once we were in, coats off and admission ($8 a person, so $16 for the two of us) paid, the fun began!
There are two floors to the SEE museum. We started out on the upper floor, where the front door was. I think we sort of breezed through most of the upper floor over the course of about half an hour or so, though we spent more time in the 'Seasons of Change' exhibit. Lots of cool and interesting stuff about how our actions now will affect the environment, and the changes we could see by 2075. There were a few notes also about changes we can already see happening, like the rising temperature of the ocean waters off the coasts of New England, which threaten the lobster population, and the decline of ground-freezing in the winter, which affects the flow of sap in the sugar maples, reducing the amount of maple syrup New England can produce.
Most of the other things on the top floor didn't really seem to catch King's eye, so we headed down the stairs to check out the lower floor. Here, we found a few more things to play with, though one large section of the floor was taken up with a non-interactive exhibit: a full historical model of the Millyard built entirely of Legos. 3 million Legos. That must've taken forever to build, but it was really cool! There was water to represent the canals and the river, there were train tracks everywhere, and horses pulling carts and carriages, people working or playing, a parade going down Elm St... VERY elaborate. There were also a few more buildings that exist in different parts of the city lined up against a different wall. I found it very cool to see that one of the buildings modeled was the administration building for the first college I went to (Notre Dame College, which closed in 2002).
King, however, wasn't particularly interested in the Legos, since he couldn't interact with them. We played with a couple musical displays, then wandered along, finding some displays about electricity. These didn't hold our attention for all that long, though, and we wandered away, finding a robotic arm to play with (and gaining a whole new level of respect for the kids that operate the FIRST robots! Attempting to get the arm to pick something up was tough!). After that we passed through a set of hanging blue-and-clear plastic into a mock-up of a submarine...where I quickly discovered that I would not be able to get a good look through the periscope, because I was too tall. Exiting the submarine, we turned a corner through another set of hanging plastic 'water' and found ourselves in a section focused on optical illusions! King was temporarily entranced by a computer which displayed several common optical illusions, while I went a little ways ahead to look in another room, which was labeled as containing more optical illusions. There was a label warning of strobe lights, though, so I decided we'd better skip that room--King doesn't handle strobe lights all that well, I remembered.
We played with a number of optical illusions as we wandered through the exhibit. One of them involved a neon light (a straight bar) that spun when turned on, and allowed you to control a number of variables--pulse frequency, spin speed, and voltage. We messed with that one for a couple minutes, then I managed to do something that made my head hurt, so I decided that was enough and we moved on to another exhibit.
We worked our way through a number of fun things, a fair amount of which spun in some fashion, including a display of gears held to a 'wall' by magnets, which didn't seem to entertain King as much as it did me. Of course, my attempts at lining up the gears to turn lots of them kept disconnecting. While I was attempting to get the gears going, King found a seat--chairs that were connected to a pulley system--the idea being that you pull yourself up! This looked like fun, so I took a seat in the other chair and gave the rope a tug--woah, it's harder than I thought! King couldn't get his chair to move on his own (you'd have to be able to lift 1/7th of your weight to pull up the chair he was sitting in, and 1/7th of and adult'sequivalent to about 6 bags of flour). King appeared to be impressed by this, and we swapped chairs. I pulled the new chair up to the top as well, watching him tug ineffectually on the rope and laugh. Then I let myself down and hopped up to try pulling his chair while he sat there. Again, rather easier said than done. I had to pull while walking away and use my foot to hold the rope down while I adjusted my grip. I took him about three-quarters of the way up, and then he decided that was too high (to be fair, the chairs did not have any kind of belt mechanism, so he was probably nervous about the possibility of falling out). Letting him down was almost as difficult as getting him up, since I really didn't want to just drop him. I managed, though, and we wandered off to explore the next exhibit and give my hands a rest.
Once we'd made our way through all the exhibits on the lower floor, including hitting the bathrooms, we headed back upstairs. Wandering back through the submarine mock-up, I caught sight of something I'd missed the first time through--a 'holograph' image of a shark in one of the portholes! I jumped, startled by all the teeth, and King got a good laugh out of it with me. We stopped at the bottom of the stairs to play with a small exhibit on air currents for a moment before clanking our way back up the metal staircase.
On the entry floor again, we wandered through more of the exhibits, ducked under a wooden wall into a giant kaleidoscope, and explored. There was a section with several brain-teaser type puzzles, though this was apparently more interesting to me than to King. We'd hit all the exhibits except those behind a fence which looked like they were specially geared for younger kids (say about 5 years old or younger), so we decided to take a quick walk through the gift shop, just to see if anything caught our eye. King wanted to get some Oreos, so I asked if he was hungry. His reply boiled down to "No, but I am thirsty," so we hit up a nearby vending machine for a Coke, which we ended up splitting. He got a straw and drank his fill, and then I finished the can since it was a can and we couldn't really carry it around.
After refreshing ourselves, we went back to the exhibit on weather ('Seasons of Change') and poked around for a while. King sat down to play with a computer running a display called 'Boston Underwater' about the changing levels of the water in Boston Harbour and around the city, especially during storms, and I went to the big table to fiddle with 'environmental effects' and see if I could make it tell a kinder story about 2075. I got frustrated a few minutes later when the table seemed to be having trouble accepting my inputs, so I went back to King and discovered that the computer he'd been playing with apparently had a problem. It was giving him an error message, which was frustrating because there was nothing at all which we could do about it with the buttons available.
"I'm sorry," I told him, "I guess it's busted. Shall we go look at something else?"
"Yeah. Why's it busted?"
"I dunno."
"It said I should reload the link." Except there was nothing we could click the link with to reload it, so we went to look at the rest of the exhibit.
After some more time spent exploring the 'Seasons of Change' area, we decided that we'd pretty much done everything we wanted to at the museum and dinner sounded like a good idea, even if it was a bit early. On that note, we called up my husband to ask him to drive us to Jillian's (mostly because I wasn't sure walking would be a good idea with my back acting up and the rain threatening).
While we waited for our ride, we started brainstorming ideas for what we could do next week, coming up with a decent list. Once we got dropped off at Jillian's, we crafted the part of this entry that his King's take on the day, then decided on our top three ideas for next week.
Dinner was delicious, and desert was even better--we got the 'Killer Chocolate Cake', which turned out to be a wonderfully chocolaty creation, two layers of melt-in-your-mouth fudge with a smaller layer of cake in between. It was so deliciously rich that even splitting the one piece we couldn't finish it, but it was so good!
After dinner, Dad picked us up and we went our separate ways home, looking forward to next week's adventure!


King's take:
King liked playing with the robotic arm and the pulleys, but the pulleys were too high.
We went to the SEE museum.
Today was great because we went to the SEE museum. We went to a computer that had flood warnings but it stopped working. It wanted us to reload the link.
We went up the elevator. We paid $20 for admission and we got change back.
We went downstairs. There were Legos downstairs. There were a LOT of Legos! They were built into a college and a lot of other things, like city hall.
We saw a computer that had changing illusions on it. I thought illusions were only mirages! The computer changed different illusions.
We saw some gears and pulleys, a robotic arm. We did see some turtle cages, but they weren't downstairs.
We went back upstairs.
We went to the gift shop and I looked at some Oreos.
I went to the vending machine to get $1 for a Coke. I put a dollar into the vending machine to get a Coke. We asked for a straw because I couldn't drink the Coke without a straw.
We watched something about lobsters and about maple syrup and something about Boston underwater. The Boston underwater computer had a problem. We decided to do something else.
We called Archi to take us to Jillian's.
The car had a mess. You should clean it up sometime. (Miaka note: I have been telling my husband all summer that the car needs to get cleaned out, but it hasn't happened, and at this point probably won't until it starts to get warm again.)
We talked about what we should do next week.
Miaka got startled by a picture of a shark.
We got pizza and Philly Cheesesteak at Jillian's.
We're going to have Killer Chocolate Cake after our dinner is done.
I am going to box up my pizza and save it for lunch tomorrow.
We had a good time today.