Once in a blue moon

"My husband changes diapers once in a blue moon".

You have all heard the expression. It is really our way of saying it NEVER happens; kind of like "When pigs fly".

Well, if you believe that a blue moon never happens, you are wrong. In fact, this New Years Eve, we'll have a blue moon.

A blue moon is a full moon that is not timed to the regular monthly pattern. Most years have twelve full moons which occur approximately monthly, but in addition to those twelve full lunar cycles, each solar calendar year contains an excess of roughly eleven days compared to the lunar year. The extra days accumulate, so that every two or three years (on average about every 2.7154 years), there is an extra full moon. The extra moon is called a "blue moon."

Now, before you are HORRIBLY disappointed on New Years Eve, the blue moon...IS NOT BLUE.

The New Year's Eve non-blue blue moon will be visible in the United States, Canada, Europe, South America and Africa. For partygoers in Australia and Asia, the full moon does not show up until New Year's Day, making January a blue moon month for them.

However, the Eastern Hemisphere can celebrate with a partial lunar eclipse on New Year's Eve when part of the moon enters the Earth's shadow. The eclipse will not be visible in the Americas.

A full moon occurred on Dec. 2 this year. It will appear again on Thursday in time for the New Year's countdown.

The popular definition of blue moon came about after a writer for Sky&Telescope magazine in 1946 misinterpreted the Maine Farmer's Almanac and labeled a blue moon as the second full moon in a month. In fact, the almanac defined a blue moon as the third full moon in a season with four full moons, not the usual three.

Though Sky&Telescope corrected the error decades later, the definition caught on.

For purists, however, this New Year's Eve full moon doesn't even qualify as a blue moon. It's just the first full moon of the winter season.

Any way you look at, it won't be blue, but it WILL be interesting and could be a great way to begin some research into lunar cycles.

Now, if you would like to begin a HISTORY lesson, show your kids how old you are and try singing the rest of this...

"Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone, Without a dream in my heart, Without a love of my own..."

CURIOUS EVENTS IN NEBRASKA LAST WEEK

FROM DECEMBER 17. WWW.SPACEWEATHER.COM

"Last night, Dec. 16th at 9 p.m. CST, a very bright meteor lit up the completely overcast sky like lightning in southeast Nebraska," reports Trooper Jerry Chab of the Nebraska State Patrol. "It flashed for approximately 2 seconds and was followed by sonic booms and ground shaking, which prompted many calls by the public to law enforcement in a three county wide area." Meanwhile, the USGS says there was a magnitude 3.5 earthquake near Auburn, Nebraska, at 8:53 pm, about the same time and place as the fireball.

"If the earthquake is confirmed, as it appears to be, I think we have the most cosmic of coincidences: A large fireball around the same time of an earthquake," says Chab. "I am simply amazed!"

One possible interpretation of these events is that a small asteroid hit Earth's atmosphere and caused the ground to shake when it exploded in mid-air. However, the timing might not be right. The quake seems to have preceded the fireball. Several readers have pointed out studies that associate lightning-like phenomena with earthquakes: #1, #2, #3. So, the earthquake might be responsible for both the shaking and the light show. Or it might be a big coincidence just as Chab suggests.

More reports could help sort out the possibilities. Readers in Nebraska with photos or eyewitness accounts have been encouraged to submit their observations.

Some eyewitness accounts include:

Eyewitness Accounts:

Location: 5 miles NW of Pawnee City, Nebraska
Comments: Nebraska State Trooper Jerry Chab: "At 2100 CST tonight a very bright meteor lit up the entire completely overcast sky like lightning in southeast Nebraska. It flashed for approximately 1.5-2 seconds and was followed by sonic booms and ground shaking which prompted many calls by the public to law enforcement in a three County wide area."

"I was approximately 5 miles NW of Pawnee City, Ne. when I observed the flashes," Chab continues. "It was a very bright one, the sky dimmed a bit and it was followed by another bright flash. Between the two bright flashes the sky never completely dimmed. Again, this all occurred within 1.5-2 seconds. I talked to a truck driver who was approx. 8 miles straight East of me who saw the same thing. A local Deputy was about 16 miles ENE of me and also saw it. The first 911 call came at 2201. The calls were about explosions AND earthquakes. One individual call mentioned 'two' explosions. I attributed the calls to sonic booms."

"If the Earthquake is confirmed, as it appears to be, I think we have the most cosmic of coincidences: A large fireball around the same time of an Earthquake. I am simply amazed!!"

For more accounts or to submit yours, CLICK HERE

This week, research earthquake lightning, meteors and Nebraska Earthquakes.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Happy Holidays

With 2009's final blast hitting the country, the Chasing4Life team will be busy navigating roads and reporting conditions throughout the holiday. We want to wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas and the very happiest of holidays. If you are in the path of all this weather, please do not let our efforts this year go to waste...stay prepared at home!

We want to thank all of you that supported us this year and we are looking forward to what looks to be an AMAZING new year.

As you spend some time with your families this next week, stay tuned to our Twitter and keep us in your prayers.

Happy Holidays!

Tragic Loss in Henderson, TN

As we tour, we make friends and those friends quickly become family. This Monday was to be the day that we touched base with our new friends and family in Tennessee to arrange for a return tour. It is tonight that we are truly saddened to find that one of the towns we grew to love has suffered a horrible, tragic loss.
Captain Dennis Cagle, a police officer in Henderson, Tennessee (Chester County) was shot on Thursday and passed away this morning. Alannah and I were shocked to hear of the loss and are truly saddened. Our prayers and thoughts are with the folks in Chester County as they deal with this horrible loss during what should be such a joyous season.

Energy...

One thing I know for sure is that trudging through 4 foot snow drifts for days on end has me running out of energy. I spent HOURS shoveling and ran out of energy again! Last night, I was too tired to eat.
Energy is in the news all the time, we say that we want to save energy and so we turn off a light, we even say we have run out of energy physically, but do we really know what energy is? It is a hard concept to teach, especially to the younger ones. My sons understand a little about energy, but no matter how much we talk of recycling and saving energy, do they really get the science of it?
I found a great site to help you talk and teach about energy. The great thing is, YOU will save energy by using this site because it is interactive and you really let the kids just "go at it"!
To find the site, simply CLICK HERE

The flu close up and personal

I wanted to share a GREAT site with you today. Take a look at the flu close up by CLICKING HERE.

This site is a blog created to be a unique health information source. The graphics are great and a fantastic resource for teaching your kids about the SCIENCE of this flu!

Breathe!

We have been talking a lot about H1N1 around our house, taking precautions, limiting interaction with families where we know someone is sick, and of course, we have scrubbed our own fingerprints off washing our hands. So what can we learn as we talk about swine flu? Well, the subjects are actually endless. The last few days we have discussed forensics, actually figuring out ways that the flu can be spread from person to person, thinking about how many people we come in contact with each and every day, but the REALLY interesting subjects can come from talking about WHAT the flu does.

Trying to explain to my kids that the flu is a respiratory illness was pretty pointless until I could explain to them what RESPIRATORY was.

Have your kids ever asked how do you breathe? What are lungs? What do they look like and how do they work? Have you ever wondered this yourself? Here is a super simple, super easy project to explain this.

SUPPLIES:

One 1-liter or 1-quart clear plastic bottle ( a good way to recycle those water bottles!)
One large balloon
One small balloon
Two rubber bands
One straw
Modeling clay

DIRECTIONS:

1. Cut off the bottom of the bottle. You can use a serrated knife, a utility knife, or scissors … what ever sharp instrument you use, please use standard safety rules.
2. Cut the neck off of the large balloon.
3. Stretch this balloon over the bottom of the bottle. Put a rubber band around it to hold it in place.
4. Insert the straw into the neck of the balloon.
5. Tie the balloon to the straw using the other rubber band.
6. Put the balloon end of the straw into the bottle so that the balloon is all the way into the bottle but does not touch the balloon over the bottom of the bottle.
7. Secure the straw in the bottle by using the modeling clay. Make sure the clay completely covers the mouth of the bottle, but does not crimp the straw.
8. Push on the rubber at the bottom of the bottle. What happens? Is this like breathing in or out?
9. Pull the rubber down. Which way would you be breathing now?

What happens? The stretched balloon across the bottom of the bottle acts like a diaphragm. This is the flat muscle at the bottom of the chest cavity. This muscle forces air in and out of your lungs. Your lungs do not inflate or deflate by themselves … a muscle, your diaphragm, is pulling or pushing so that you can breathe.

Happy Thanksgiving Everybody!

Home School Expo

We have added the RSS feed from the Chicago Home School Expo to the blog site! You can see the latest updates regarding the expo to your right under the Flu.gov box. For more information about the Expo, CLICK HERE.

Thanksgiving Weather

I love history. Really, ANY history. The problem with history is that I have a hard time teaching it to my kids sometimes. I fear that in a microwave society where everything is about the next minute, what happened 300 years ago sometimes gets lost in the shuffle.

There are a ton of blogs out there on homeschool sites right now talking about activities surrounding the “Being thankful” theme, so I wanted to do something different. As always, I can teach almost subject as long as I can relate it to severe weather, so let’s take a look at Thanksgiving weather and see if we can find a way to teach history to the kiddies during the holiday week ahead…

We can pull almost any book off the shelf in our homes and quickly show the children that the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock, but can we tell them why?

The Pilgrims actually made the decision to land on the shores of Massachusetts because of the weather! At the time that the ship was was passing the southeastern tip of Cape Cod, the wind and waves pushed the crews to make landfall to save the ship from the turbulent seas! You see, the folks on the Mayflower originally intended on going all the way to New York Harbor. The Mayflower only weighed about 180 tons, which seems large, but if you compare it to ships of today was actually not large at all! On November 19, 1620, the ship found itself in the dangerous shoals east of Monomoy Point.

MONOMOY POINT

With a south wind, the Pilgrims were able to backtrack northward and using the wind for two more days finally made it to Provincetown Harbor after 65 days at sea! According to historical reports, the Pilgrims knew they were in trouble, for the weather had forced them to land in a place they were very unfamiliar with no place for them to take shelter. The reputation of the North American winters had been widely spread back home…

While the winter was mild that year, the beginning of December was not. This made it very difficult for the Pilgrims to explore the strange land they had “found” by way of foul weather. By December 7th, the ground was covered with snow and frozen solid. Some reports say the snow was at least 6 inches deep. As if things could not get worse, the wind became so bad on the 17th of December that old journals say the Pilgrims were coated with ice from the ocean spray.

Imagine wind, snow and ice in New England in mid-December! Remember, there was no place to live!

Exploration parties were formed and they went out in search of shelter and on the 18th, it began to snow and rain. YUCK! The search for a sheltered location continued through December 18 and 19 when the decision was made to actually land the boat at Plymouth Rock, thus ending the trip on December 21 from a small rowboat and not from the larger Mayflower.

For the record, the Pilgrims stepped foot on a sandy beach despite the location’s name!

Why the rowboat? With wicked weather and an unknown land ahead, the women and children were left on the Mayflower and only ten men rowed to shore. Hostile natives were definitely a concern…

Once satisfied that Plymouth Rock was the best place to weather the new world’s weather, the small crew went back to the Mayflower and everyone came to Plymouth on the Mayflower on December 26 where a decision was made to start the colony right there.

PLYMOUTH

The winter of 1620-'21 was "a calm winter, such as was never seen here since," wrote Thomas Dudley of Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Edward Winslow, one of the original Pilgrims, also wrote about the "remarkable mildness" of that first winter in “Good Newes From New England” published in 1624. There was testimony by others to a mild end of December, a moderate January, a brief cold spell with sleet and some snow in early February, followed by definitely mild conditions and an early spring.

Despite the generally warmer than normal conditions, almost half of the original passengers and crew of the Mayflower succumbed to disease during the first winter on the shores of Massachusetts and Cape Cod Bay.

Could it have been because of their journey through bad weather as well? Records show that most of the Pilgrims came ashore with HORRIBLE coughs at Plymouth!

Many lived on board the Mayflower anchored a mile-and-a-half offshore and went to the land each day, weather permitting, to build adequate shelters. It was wet and windy most of that winter, but thankfully little snow came after the Pilgrims landed.

There are not many more records of the weather from the Pilgrim’s early days here, and it is thought that this was a marketing issue; you see, if they wrote home about harsh winters, nobody else would come!

WEATHER IN NEW ENGLAND

Are you watching the weather this week in New England?

MASSACHUSETTS MAP

Look at the map of Massachusetts and journal this week’s weather! Could you have made the last of the journey? Would the Pilgrims have gotten a wind from the south this year? What would the weather have been this year for the Pilgrims? What’s the long term forecast for the next 30 days? How many obstacles did the Pilgrims face and how many of them were worsened because of weather?

What might have changed if the Pilgrims had landed at New York where there was businesses, shelter and trade already?

How many historical moments in history have been governed by weather?

Watch your mouth!

Touring the country I get to hear a lot of cool things out of kid's mouths. As a parent, I know that sometimes not everything that comes out of a child's mouth is funny, especially when they are repeating something they heard you say that you shouldn't have...

I have gotten several hundred letters from kids in the last several months, most of them are from school children I met on tour. I love the things they remembered and laugh at how they focused on the LEAST important thing out of a 90 minute assembly.

One letter I got recently from a girl that attended a 90 minute presentation for her 5th grade class was this:

"Thanks for coming. I liked your boots!"

Here's another:

I learned alot about bad weather like when you said you still get scared!"

It is what makes children fun isn't it? It reminds me that they ARE listening. ALL the time...just not to what we THINK they are listening to...be careful what you say!

I remember the show "Kids say the darndest things" and was a big fan so I was excited to find a list of things kids have said about science that they THOUGHT they had learned at school.

Enjoy!

• "One horsepower is the amount of energy it takes to drag a horse 500 feet in one second."

• "You can listen to thunder after lightning and tell how close you came to getting hit. If you don't hear it, you got hit, so never mind."

• "Talc is found on rocks and on babies."

• "Isn't inertia when something is moving, then it stops moving and keeps moving?"

• "The law of gravity says no fair jumping up without coming back down."

• "When they broke open molecules, they found they were only stuffed with atoms. But when they broke open atoms, they found them stuffed with explosions."

• "When people run around and around in circles we say they are crazy. When planets do it we say they are orbiting."

• "Rainbows are just to look at, not to really understand."

• "While the earth seems to be knowingly keeping its distance from the sun, it is really only centrificating."

• "Someday we may discover how to make magnets that can point in any direction."

• "South America has cold summers and hot winters, but somehow they still manage."

• "Water freezes at 32 degrees and boils at 212 degrees. There are 180 degrees between freezing and boiling because there are 180 degrees between north and south."

• "A vibration is a motion that cannot make up its mind which way it wants to go."

• "There are 26 vitamins in all, but some of the letters are yet to be discovered. Finding them all means living forever."

• "There is a tremendous weight pushing down on the center of the Earth because of so much population stomping around up there these days."

• "Lime is a green-tasting rock."

• "Many dead animals in the past changed to fossils, while others preferred to be oil."

• "Genetics explain why you look like your father, and if you don't why you should."

• "Vacuums are nothings. We only mention them to let them know we know they're there."

• "Some oxygen molecules help fires burn, while others help make water, so sometimes it's brother against brother."

• "Some people can tell what time it is by looking at the sun. But I have never been able to make out the numbers."

• "We say the cause of perfume disappearing is evaporation. Evaporation gets blamed for a lot of things people forget to put the top on."

• "To most people, solutions mean finding the answers. But to chemists, solutions are things that are still all mixed up."

• "In looking at a drop of water under a microscope, we find there are twice as many H's as O's."

• "Clouds are high flying fogs."

• "I am not sure how clouds get formed. But the clouds know how to do it, and that is the important thing."

• "Clouds just keep circling the earth around and around. And around. There is not much else to do."

• "Water vapor gets together in a cloud. When it is big enough to be called a drop, it does."

• "Humidity is the experience of looking for air and finding water."

• "We keep track of the humidity in the air so we won't drown when we breathe."

• "Rain is often known as soft water, oppositely known as hail."

• "Rain is saved up in cloud banks."

• "In some rocks you can find the fossil footprints of fishes."

• "Cyanide is so poisonous that one drop of it on a dog's tongue will kill the strongest man."

• "The wind is like the air, only pushier."

• "A blizzard is when it snows sideways."

• "A hurricane is a breeze of a bigly size."

• "A monsoon is a French gentleman."

• "Thunder is a rich source of loudness."

• "Isotherms and isobars are even more important than their names sound."

• "It is so hot in some places that the people there have to live in other places."

• "Most books now say our sun is a star. But it still knows how to change back into a sun in the daytime."