First day of the fire, last day at the beach

A little over a month ago, just before school started, we woke up to a smoky day. The "Station Fire" that was just barely completely contained this week started the afternoon before. So we headed to the beach. Despite the hot days since then, it was my last day at the beach for the season (AYSO=all you saturdays occupied).
We went to Manhattan Beach which has a small aquarium out on the pier. Here is Nathaniel finding out if the shark can bite his head off.

Shark breath.

Davis and Nathaniel on the pier.

We went up above the Rosebowl to take some snapshots of the fire. This is only one part of it. It spread from here (JPL in the foreground) all the way east past Pasadena. At night you could see flames on the hillside.

Luckily for us, the air-flow was headed from the ocean to the east, so our air wasn't as smokey as it could have been. It's still weird to see ashes floating down like grungy snowflakes.

JPL Open House

Saturday Nathaniel and I headed up the Arroyo to the open house at NASA's Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL). Its an annual event and I expected to walk through one building of JPL scientists with posters demonstrating a few rovers. It was actually a huge event with more than 20 buildings on the college-sized campus hosting displays. We received an id-badge style lanyard in which we put the activity cards we collected at different stations throughout the displays.
We didn't wait in any of the long lines (for the robo-dome that was demonstrating hovercraft rovers) but we saw some cool stuff. Here's Nathaniel in front of a giant rover prototype that easily rolls over this little boulder and turns on a dime.

Don't we look like we're having fun?

Chris has been working on some industry report for sustainable energy companies. He had asked how electricity is used to turn water into hydrogen fuel. They had a display sitting on a table doing just that. This is a little solar panel which makes electricity that is channeled through the column of water (electrolyzer chamber) in the background. We could see bubbles rising in the water which was hydrogen and oxygen gas. I don't know how they separate the hydrogen and oxygen, but the hydrogen can be stored for use later in a fuel cell to re-create electricity.

Here's the diagram for those of you who want to build your own "storable" solar energy system.

And I couldn't resist taking a photo of the working lego-model of the solar system. The battery operated drill on the right is the motor running the gears.

We had a great day with all the cool stuff to see and the soft pretzels and kettle corn. A fun mother-son outing!