A Metamorphosis

A sister I visit teach told me about these butterfly kits she had ordered for her nieces for birthday presents. They were apparently a big hit. Since we are supposed to be doing preschool at home, I got a kit for Camille so we could study the caterpillars and butterflies before it got too cold to release them.

The caterpillars came in this cup with the food at the bottom. These guys grew fast!

When they are ready to pupate, they hang in J's from the ceiling. There is a little paper disc at the top of the cup. Notice that the first chrysalide fell from the top and is sitting at the bottom of the cup.

All the chrysalides

Close-up. They don't actually make cocoons, their outer layer just hardens up.

After 7-10 days the butterflies emerge. This is one just coming out. It's wings are still crumpled up.

They expel this red stuff--meconium.

Ready for release

This one hung around for pictures, most likely because he had trouble flying.

Science is beautiful!

My Trip to Amsterdam, Netherlands

This is Brian. I was fortunate enough to recently take a business trip to the Netherlands (Holland), so I figured I'd share some pictures of the trip. It was for the International Broadcasting Convention.

We took a taxi from the airport to our hotel. Half (or more) of the taxis at the airport in Amsterdam were Teslas! I was quite impressed at the acceleration.

View outside my hotel window.

A totally separate bicycle road, with intersections. Mopeds, bicycles and these weird one-person cars could travel on these roads.

They sure love their bikes.

Dam Square, where some scenes from The Best Two Years was filmed.

They ran out of parking lot for their bikes, so they started parking them on this boat. Weird!

Very cool and very old buildings.

Church in Amsterdam. I guess they don't want people climbing to the roof!

Another picture in front of Dam Square, when it wasn't full of people.

Making fresh stroopwaffles. They were so much better than the non-fresh ones--and those were still awesome!

 

The city has a series of concentric canals throughout, seen below.

They must have had a hard time building straight buildings without all the fancy heavy equipment and precision tools we have today.

They really like their waffles, and I did too!

A 400+ year old windmill in the heart of Amsterdam.

A picture I took while flying home over Greenland! What a cool frozen tundra. I took it somewhere around these coordinates.

What an adventure, and how nice it was to have a non-stop flight from Salt Lake City to Amsterdam. What I learned from the trip (besides the work side of things at the convention) is that I really liked traveling internationally. Where should we (Sarah and I) go next?