thespicelands.com

Tru started her second season of soccer today. We had practice from 5-6. Her team is being coached by a parent of one of her teammates last season. The coaches get to pick their players, and he picked Tru! Tru is very excited to have his daughter, Brianna, on her team again. They are The Purple Jaguars. My camera batteries were dead, so I didn’t get any pictures. I did get this one video, though. They only did drills today, though, so it wasn’t very exciting.

Aerogarden Timelapse

Erin got an Aerogarden for me for father’s day as a *big* surprise. It is an “indoor kitchen appliance.” More specifically, it is a microcontroller based hydroponic garden that is about a cubic foot. It sits on one’s counter and grows things. We have herbs and peppers in ours. For the first month, we set our DSLR camera up, pointed at the Aerogarden, and set it to take a picture once every 30 seconds. The video below was made from those pictures. Also, below you will find a link to an HD video that you can download.

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Here is the 720p HD version at 60 frames per second:
http://spiceland.org/media/timelapse720.avi

^^^ click the link above to download the HD version.

Robotic Baseball

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T-ball? Sports? Why learn to play when you can build a robot to play with your daughter? (just a joke of course)

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Above is a trailer for a new movie coming out soon. I thought it looked hilarious so I thought I’d share. Also, I wanted an excuse to try embedding a Hulu video

Bird Cam

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We installed a camera on our front porch. We have a bird that comes each year and makes a nest on the top of one of the columns of our front porch. We aimed the cam at him and installed some software that captures videos whenever it detects motion. Here is a short clip.

Here’s the video!

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Here is a video I found while cleaning off my desktop which I do not believe we have posted yet. This is me clownishly trying to get Heidi to say “dada” around age 8 months.

I’ll also update concerning the last post about Heidi signing. After that one incident, she seemed to have forgotten how to sign for a couple of days. My urging did not provoke her to sign again until tonight. Mike made oatmeal cookies tonight, though. She was sitting in my lap while I was eating one, and she started clapping out of the blue. I clapped along for a moment before I realized she was actually saying “more,” not clapping. I fed her bits of cookie and made her say “more” for each additional bite. She probably signed “more” about 8 times tonight.

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Logging GPS in Keith’s RC Plane

We put a custom designed GPS logger in Keith’s rc plane. The cool part of the video starts 2/3 of the way in. I take the logged data and show it in Google Maps and Google Earth.

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Here are some direct links to Google Maps (click on “view in Google Earth” for the really cool version) :
Keith’s RC Stryker
Keith’s Green Plane

We had Tru’s EEG to measure brain activity this morning. An EEG (Electroencephalography) records the electrical activity of neurons firing in the brain. EEGs are especially effective at diagnosing epilepsy and other seizure disorders. In preparation for the test, we had to keep Tru awake until 1 AM last night. Wonderful, sweet Mike let me sleep from 8 PM to 11 PM. I couldn’t go back to sleep, so the four of us (after Heidi woke up from a very late nap) watched Star Trek: The Next Generation until 1 AM. Tru conked out quite easily. This morning, I had to wake her at 5 AM and keep her awake until her 9 AM appointment, so we were quite tired by the end of the test.

Tru films Heidi before the test.

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Tru preparing for the test. The nurse took her to the test room and explained the procedure while I was in the bathroom. The chair Tru is sitting in is for the mother to hold the child if the child is too distraught to lay in bed. We did not have to use it.

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During the test.

The nurse scrubbed Tru’s scalp with a q-tip and put leads all over it with a gunky, conductive substance. Tru did not like being dirty one bit. The nurse then wrapped her head so that the leads would stay put, and Tru didn’t like this either. I thought she would have fun laughing at how silly the test was, but she was just too tired and cranky to enjoy it.

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First, the nurse measured her brain activity with Tru lying quietly on the bed. Then she asked Tru to close her eyes for a minute. Next, Tru had to blow a pinwheel for 4 minutes. I demonstrated to get her started and intermittently to keep her going, and I was totally out of breathe. I don’t know how Tru managed to do it for so long! The nurse said that 4 minutes is usually a pipe dream in a child as young as Tru, but she did blow most of that time. Next, she measured Tru’s brain activity while flashing her open and closed eyes with a strobe light with the light strobing at different intervals. Finally, Tru rested with the lights off for about 30 minutes. The hope was that she would fall asleep, but she never did go completely to sleep.

When we were finished, Tru’s hair was very dirty and gunky! She was not a happy camper, but Chicken McNuggets and Sprite cures anything. We immediately went to McDonald’s for lunch and home for a nap. Now that we’re awake, all of us are feeling much better! We should get the results of the EEG in about a week and a half. Cross your fingers!