LEGO Competition Results and What Don's Reading

M and his awesome LEGO creation

LEGOs!
M won a medal at this year's LEGO competition, sponsored by the Ann Arbor Public Library. His scene featured a large boat, a dock, some divers and even some LED lights illuminating the interior of the boat. He won for "Best Architectural or Engineering" project. Congratulations!

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A couple of book reports from the "Breezy Summer Reading" library list...

Book 1
First up is "Mountains Beyond Mountains" by Tracy Kidder. This is a biography of a doctor and humanitarian aid worker named Paul Farmer, whose primary work was on TB in Haiti. He also helped put programs in place in Peru and Russia.

One of the most impressive things about him and his group, Partners in Health, was how they brought the cost of TB medicines down. They lobbied the World Health Organization to put certain TB drugs on their preferred list of drugs, which was encouragement to pharmaceutical companies to produce generics for those drugs. The cost of treatment for a patient dropped dramatically - in one case, from $1,500 to only $150, and in another case, from $95 to 95 cents.

Book 2: The Second Book
The next book, and yes, I've been tearing through them lately, is Blind Descent, the story of two teams of people looking for the deepest caves on earth. If you think the people who climb Mt. Everest are crazy, you don't know these deep cavers. They are truly insane. If you like the idea of crawling through spaces no bigger than yourself for hundreds of feet, sleeping suspended from ropes with deafening waterfalls next to you, or scuba diving into black waters when you have no idea where the waters even go, or whether you'll get trapped, then this kind of exploring is definitely for you. And also you need to have your head checked. My hat is off to these people who have the guts to quite literally enter caves, pools of water, or other cracks knowing they might not return, and that no one would be able to save them.

I think would have enjoyed this book a little more if the author had accompanied them on their trips, which I don't think he did. He just learned about it by talking to many people and reading other books. Even if he had just gone to their base camps or done a little sump diving (read the book) I would have felt closer to the action.

At any rate, I'm not walking into any cave that doesn't have a gift shop by the parking lot, near where the buses drop off the tourists.

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We harvested some veggies from the garden today - some tomatoes and a pepper. Yummy! We're learning a lot, and not exactly getting the results we were hoping for, but we're not doing too badly for our first time.

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