Breakaway Day 30 – 16 Days to Go!

Today’s entry will be short since it took me all day to finish yesterday’s entry!Thanks to Calvin’s grandmother, Grandma Phillips for supplying bagels and really fancy donuts (doughnuts, since they are fancy) for breakfast.  Grandma Phillips is not to be confused with Grandma Drake who is in the Okefenokee Swamp taking photos of alligators.

Alex R. became the first freshman to get 100% on the game test!  Way to go, Alex!

More work on the web pages today! Mentor Kim is finding photos of alumni from the first years of the team to post in the alumni section.  Matthieu was updating the leadership section, and feeding Mentor Eric E. with things to update and tweak. Mentor Eric did add a twitter feed which shows up on the sidebar of the web page.  Parentor Lee has been very regular about posting tweets.  I’m not a twitter person, so it is interesting to read them on our web page.

What we had for Lunch!  Our lunch today was provided by a former Team Super-Mom, Shelley! She and her son, John brought us Chili with shredded cheese to put on to, macaroni and cheese, broccoli and cauliflower and a batch of Shelley’s famous, magic, “special” brownies!  And they were delicious!

There’s not too much other news to report.  Most of the students left early for Superbowl Parties.  Traveling Mentors, Kim and Eric E. will be relaxing tonight before heading back to Boston tomorrow.  They’ll be back for the last weekend before ship! (Rally weekend!) Some of the students brought in snacks to share, in case some of the mentors had wanted to stay through the evening and work.  But instead we pretty much called it an evening and did some good cleaning of the shop areas to get them ready for the school week.

Crystal reported that she is planning on submitting an entry to sing the national anthem at FLR.  Andy reported that WindRiver took his programming changes and dumped them into the river.  He had to recreate them.  Programming also completed the autonomous code and is ready to test it on the robot.  Mechanical teams spent more time in the icebox today, designing and detailing.  Shauna and Becca sent lifter drawings to Harris and spent some time in the shop manufacturing parts including 2 rollers and 2 shafts, and cutting the stock for several others.  Speaking of making parts, some of the mechanical sub-team is headed to VanBortel Machine Shop on Monday to drop off some materials and drawings, and work with the owner, Ike VanBortel. This is a favorite activity each build season.