Sonya World

I learned the basic chess moves almost a year ago but never got around to playing. My cousin is visiting us from New York and I started playing the game with him and it is a lot of fun!

After a few games, I knew how the pieces moved and how best to protect the king. It is little confusing sometimes and you have to look at so many things at the same time, but may be that’s why it is a fun game!

I challenged my dad for a game and we started playing, Before I knew it, I had captured his one rook, one bishop, one knight and several pawns! Then I saw that I could take my queen all the way to his side and gave him the check warning; he moved his king but he didn’t notice that the king was in the direct path of my bishop and I got him!

Also I didn’t know that chess was invented in India about 1300 years ago! Here is a painting of Krishna playing chess.

I think I will start taking some lessons in playing chess.

Last week my mom visited my school during the science class and did a nice demo and explained the motion of molecules.

She put a drop of color in a glass of water and asked us to not touch the glass of the table and then we watched the color slowly spread out in the water!

She explained to us tha these are molecules and they have energy and they move around and bump in to each other and get mixed up!

It was really fun to watch the pretty swirl of the red color in the water and sure enough, everything was all mixed up in a couple of hours.

My class mates, the second graders, asked a lot of questions! They even asked if the molecules ever stop and my mom explained that when it is really really really cold like -300 degree centigrade everything slows down a lot. Cool!

The next day I made a model of salt crystal using marshmallows and promptly ate them all!!

I love playing Domino Rally! I have about three sets with total of more than 1000 pieces of dominos with some stunt stuff like a motorcycle and flying plane!

The sets come with little go carts where you stack the dominos and it lines them up nicely and neatly. My dad and I spread all our dominos in the living room, and stack them up as much as we can. Then we used the pivoted dominos to connect them. I even have a cart that can stack the dominos in a curved line but it doesn’t work as well.

The best part is when I flick the first domino and it gets the chain reaction going! I have some videos of my domino creations and I will post them sometime.

Its not as much fun as the Rube-Goldberg machines but its nice and fun!

Had a great visit to Mt. Baldy yesterday. It was a nice and warm sunny day and I wasn’t even sure there will be any snow there. My dad tried to tell me the white lines on the road was actually snow.. ha ha.. he is such a kidder!

We got to the ski lifts and I was a bit apprehensive about getting on those dangling chairs but as soon as I got on there and lowered the bars down, I started enjoying the ride. It was exhilarating for sure.

I looked around and there still was a sprinkle of snow on the ground and the area where people were practicing had a hard ice on it. My dad found a broken piece of a bucket there and in no time I was riding that piece of plastic and made it in to an improvised sled! It turned out to be a perfect sled, it had a curvature and ridges and moved so fast!

I think I was on the improvised-bucket-sled for a couple of hours, almost till the sun went down!

Mt. Baldy (real name Mt. San Antonio) is the highest peak in Los Angeles county. Wonder why is it called Mt. Baldy? Did you know that the peak of the Mt. Baldy was used in the famous experiment to calculate the speed of light? If I had known, I would have taken my laser gun with me!