Sculpture park

on sunday we went again to the de cordova sculpture park. we were there less than a month ago, but enjoyed it so much (as well as the way driving towards it; especially now with the fall colors), that we went again. also, the museum was now opened, AND it was the first weekend of the month and thus free for us with our BofA-card :)
unfortunately it was not allowed to take pictures inside the museum; there was a nice exhibition concerning gigantic objects of rubber by martha friedman. there was also some rubbish i didnt understand, but it must have cost the artist a lot of time to create. then we toured the park, until i spotted the bubble man and forgot everything else; the perfect happening to test my new camera!! in this pic the boy was following the bubble with his hands until it burst, while i was following the boy until we almost bumped into each other, both so focused on what we were doing, and well, above you can see the result.. :)
i already posted 3 bubble pictures before, now in the back you can finally also see one of the sculptures, perfectly surrounded by the bubble....

More bubbles

i could not choose which picture to post today.. then i saw this one and wondered why i didnt take this one instead of this or this one.. most likely because last week i was indecisive as well... the two boys in red shirts destroyed the bubbles every time with so much enthousiasm, and the bubble artist kept telling to stop doing that. you could see every time a new bubble came out, they tried not to jump up, but only for a split-second...

this afternoon we probably had our last swim of this year.. :( (they close the pool tomorrow) a little cold at first, but then it was very pleasant! in the morning we had a nice walk in the forest, and after that we went to one of "our" thriftstores where i tried on some cool dresses, but they were either just too small or too large. ah well, maybe thats better, since our wardrobe is overloaded already....

Bubble jump

and although scary, the kids couldnt stop themselves jumping right into the bubbles.... :)

couldnt help but performing a bit more of pubmedsearching, and found this paper in Science from 1969, where the author is describing the size and lifespan of his bubbles; so cool!!! here is a small citation:
"Bubbles, made from solutions A to F (Table 2), were beautifully colored, although rather thick at the beginning. After bubbles made from these solutions had lasted over 200 days, I became interested in blowing larger bubbles. Big bubbles were blown in a Plexiglas box (55.9-cm edge cube) (13), but they did not last more than a week. Then, Corning Glass Works provided first one and later three 72-liter Pyrex flasks (14), the largest spherical flasks produced in this country. They were perfect for my purposes, and many bubbles were blown to a diameter of 40 to 50 cm out of solutions A to F." (for the scientists: also interesting to see that the writing style of a paper is markedly different from nowadays, just from reading this small part its clear, no?)

Some soap

some water, a little glycerol and some secret ingredients. plus good humidity, not too much sun and a little wind; that is necessary to make gigantic soap bubbles. and of course an audience is needed... i am not sure the soap artist thought children were the perfect audience, but defenitely they loved it!! the bubbles were huge, and jumping into them makes them explode and you hair full of soap (which is a little scary; see above), and blowing into them makes smaller bubbles into big bubbles. i think i took 300 pictures -mostly bad ones.. :( . the children got crazy, as soon as another bubble appeared out of the artist's net, they jumped up to destroy it, while he kept saying: leave them, leave them. at least leave them until they are a full bubble!! it was amazing to see... :)

sylvia came over from san diego, she has a meeting in boston starting friday and we took half a day off thursday to go to Lincoln, to the de cordova sculpture park. the museum was closed, but the park was interesting enough (and the bubble man)! now ofcourse we will try to make huge bubbles ourselves too... in fact there are quite some papers on pubmed about soap bubbles; just saw that in june there was a publication in nature that describes what happens to bubbles when they explode; rather than vanishing, this creates small bubbles.... just to let you know...