Fire Spinning

Here are some recent pictures of Rob's cool new hobby. He's learning to spin fire. It's called Poi, and I think it comes from New Zealand. In this picture, he has blue LEDs attached to pieces of fabric that he is spinning in the back yard.
Here he has bits of kevlar soaked in kerosene attached to chains. He lights the little kevlar balls and then spins them in the same patterns and designs as the LEDs. I like the fire ones the best because they make an incredible noise as they swoosh through the air. And aren't they pretty?
In this one, he's letting little sparks fly out while he spins, so it looks like there are little teeny fires all around him. I took these pictures with a long exposure (between 4 and six seconds) so you can see the path the fire takes and you can also catch little glimpses of how Rob moves around too. It's cool to watch in person in real time, but it also looks really cool when you can see it slowed down like this.
Sparky!

Standin' on the corner and fishin' in the lake

I went on two fun trips the last two weekends. First, I went to Winslow with my friend AJ. We slept in this pueblo that she built. It was really cool to watch the stars at night through this smoke hole in the roof. The next day, we burned the pueblo down as an archaeological experiment. She's looking at how fire behaves in prehistoric buildings and whether or not you can reconstruct the origin of the fire from the debris on the floor and the smoke patterns on the walls. I was looking at how many tree-rings are lost on the primary and secondary beams when the roof of a pueblo catches fire. That way I can know how far off tree-ring dates from a prehistoric charred log might be. Anyway, we came back very tired and very filled with smoke.
Last weekend I went with Ashley, Ryan, and Reggie to Lake Havasu to visit her family. We had a really really great time. It was very relaxing and felt like a much longer trip than the two days that it actually was. Plus, there were Yorkies!