yeah, it’s snowing

This is kindof random, but my thoughts are wandering this morning.  And, I’ve had a hard time focusing lately.  Mentally, not optically.

I have several errands to run this morning, in the midst of a major winter storm.  Oh well.  Unfortunately, the drivers around here are TERRIBLE in snow, and also unfortunately, I have been awake since before 5 AM because I am worried about getting all the things done that I need to get done.

Happily, I can amuse myself on the internets in the meanwhile, and also get the laundry started.

I like Elliot Abrams’ weather blog on Accuweather.com.  He used to do the weather for the local “all news” AM radio station here, and now he works for Accuweather on the Northeast USA.  He really enjoys his work, and it comes out in his writing.  Here’s an excerpt from his latest:

From the mountains North Carolina to parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, there will be a deep blanket of heavy snow. Near the snow rain line (eastern Virginia to the mouth of Delaware Bay) giant marshmallow snow globs will aggregate into a pasty plaster that can topple trees as if they were toothpicks and snap electric and telephone wires as if they were telephone and electric wires. Innocent snowflakes will turn to painfully stinging missiles darts and tacks, propelled by gusting gales that scream over the seas and roar through the woods. On the roads, slush mixes with salt and road grime to form a slithery sloppy slurry that defies the windshield wipers.

Maybe we won’t have school on Monday.  The prediction is for 12″ to 20″ (30 cm to 51 cm) of snow in this region.

On the annoying side, I can’t get my regular car, the Prius, into the driveway without overhanging the sidewalk.  I disconnected the transmission in the car I am converting to electric while the car was in “PARK” and now I can’t move it.  (One of several learning experiences I have had so far with this project.)  The engine is half-disassembled, there is no battery, and the car is still really heavy and the tires have a decent coefficient of friction with the ground.  But I will have to park the Prius in the driveway anyway, before the plows come by.  Here you can see the 7 AM situation:

Some friends suggested that I ask the Car Talk guys how to move the immovable Honda farther up the driveway.  Their idea is beginning to sound more attractive, though mostly I think Tom and Ray will laugh at me a lot.

Again, sorry for the disjointed post, I’m going to stop now and go do laundry.  I hope you are in a situation where you can ENJOY the snow!

Hell for hypochondriacs

About five times a day, I am convinced I am finally coming down with the “swine flu.”  That’s it, on the right.  The symptoms include fever, cough, sore throat, runny or stuffy nose, body aches, headache, chills and fatigue.  I cough several times a day.  I have post-nasal drip, which sometimes results in a sore throat.  I get chilled easily.  I am often fatigued.  I get headaches.  Different parts of my body ache at various times.  Happily, I rarely feel fevered.

There were five students absent from class first period today.  There were six absent from third period.  Third period already had one confirmed (i.e. actually tested) case, and one student has now been out for seven days.

For the first time ever, I am keeping a bottle of alcohol-based hand sanitizer on my classroom desk.  Teacher desks are some of the most microbially-rich workplace surfaces anywhere. I make sure the tissue box in the classroom is NOT on the teacher desk.

Yesterday I sent a kid to the nurse’s office at the beginning of sixth period.  He never returned, and was absent today.

We had Physics Olympics last weekend, and we were supposed to have a coaches’ meeting tonight.  But we had to postpone it because too many of the coaches were sick.

I’m STILL not sick yet.  But if I catch myself convinced for the 6th or 7th time in a day that I am finally coming down with it, I think I probably forgot to take my anxiety meds that morning.  This pandemic is hell on hypochondriacs like me.  The anticipation is killing me!

“Angry Blog Post”

AAAARRRRGGGGHHH!

I was driving home after a long, boring, mandatory meeting, and for some reason I was getting more and more tense.  I don’t know why.  I know I was getting a pain right over my right eyeball, the car behind me playing loud bass was LOUD, and I was heading toward homemade macaroni and cheese that I was going to make myself, despite the lateness of the hour.  I love macaroni and cheese, it is my ultimate comfort food, and I make it just the way I like it, of course.

I opened the door to find my wonderful husband waiting for me on the sofa, reading a biography of President Truman.  He said to me

“We have no gas.”

Let me take you back to July.  Late July.  We had a flyer stuffed in our door saying that work was going to happen starting in July to replace the gas main on our street.  No problem, it’s July.  On the designated date, our street got marked up with bright spray paint.  Nothing else happened.

OK, now it is September.  They start the work.  We deal with interesting parking, occasional street closings, dust, large machines parked on the street, big yellow pipes.  I’m very happy we did not have the workers’ porta-potty in front of our house.  That was at the far end of the block.

Today was the day they turned off the gas from the old main.  They came around to turn on the gas from the new main, but go figure, we were at WORK.  We had a nice little notice on our door with a 24-hour phone number that nobody answers.  My wonderful wonderful husband is trying to rearrange his schedule so he can be home tomorrow to call the gas company and then wait around for them to show up, since they have to have access to the house to turn on the gas and make sure that all the pilot lights work and the house doesn’t fill with gas.

Meanwhile, we have no oven, no stove.  No hot water heater, no clothes dryer.

No macaroni and cheese!

AAAARRRRGGGGHHH!

And I had to type this entire blog post twice because my computer froze up right after I typed it the first time!

AAAARRRRGGGGHHH!

Stuff I’ve Learned – Electric car wise.

A week and a half ago I attended my first EEVC meeting, finally.  I joined over the summer.  It was a very interesting meeting and I look forward to more of them!

As a result of that meeting, I have also joined the Electric Auto Association (EAA).

So what did I learn?  I learned about some of the differences between alternating current and direct current electric vehicles, including differences in cost and in operation.  One of the members had brought in an alternating current controller for show and tell.  He is installing it in his Saturn station wagon conversion.  I learned about transmissions, like YES, I really need to pull out the automatic transmission on my Civic and replace it with a manual transmission…but I won’t need a clutch.  Really.  Also, I learned that lithium-ion batteries (Li-ion) need to be clamped together to avoid having them change their shape by bulging out on the sides.  That is not a problem with lead-acid batteries.

Then after the meeting, member Ken offered rides in his Mini-E, which he was lucky enough to acquire one of the 450 1-year leases available in this country (NYC area and LA area only!).  These cars can go over 100 miles on a full charge, are silent, zippy, and you can change the color of the LED-interior lighting scheme according to your whim.  I got to drive it around the parking lot of the school where the meeting was.  The Mini-E has much stronger regenerative braking than my Prius — take your foot off the accelerator pedal and you immediately slow down dramatically!  It seats only two, due to the fact that the entire back-seat area is taken up by 5,088 Li-ion batteries!

Here are my photos of Ken’s car:

Ken is in the passenger seat

Ken has number 466 out of 500

Dashboard - the big circle in the center is the speedometer, and the display above and to the left of the steering wheel shows how much charge remains

The front grille of the Mini-E

Awesome Day

Today I hopped out of bed, put on my comfy pants and one of my favorite shirts and my yellow sunshine necklace from NovaDesigns, and immediately solved a problem that has been bugging me for several years.

My comfy pants (Gramicci cotton pants with a built-in belt) are one of those items of clothing that I wear to school (we can “dress down” on Fridays if we contribute toward a fund benefiting needy students in the district) that have no belt loops.  A lot of these clothing items are skirts, but a couple are pants.  And the thing is, I like to hang my keys from my front right belt loop using a mini-carabiner.  If I have no belt loops, I hang them from a lanyard around my neck instead, and that is less desirable for two reasons: one, the keys swing in resonance with my step frequency so if I am walking anywhere I have to hold the keys anyway or else they swing wildly after a short time; and two, they weigh me down and make my neck hurt.

So this morning at about 5:30 AM  I realized that if I take a loop of twill tape and pin it to the inside of the pants in front and on the right side, I can pull it out of my pants to hold my keys, and tuck it into my pants on weekends or other times when I don’t carry my school keys!  You would think such a simple solution would have been obvious long ago.  Ah well, my next sewing project will be sewing the twill tape loops into pants and skirts!

But that was only the beginning!

I had students come to my class before homeroom to do work and get help!  Usually my conceptual-level kids just don’t care that much about their grade and don’t mind that much if they don’t understand something.  But this year there is something different in the atmosphere.  Another teacher I spoke to yesterday said she noticed it too.  There is a collective seriousness towards studying this year among the kids.  The other teacher speculated that word had gotten around that colleges are much harder to get into than they used to be, so you have to have better grades to get into less-competitive schools nowadays.  I don’t know that high school students generally think that far ahead.  And it is hard for me to believe that the president’s speech to kids really made THAT much of an impact.  Whatever it is, I am glad of it.  I love my classes so far.  My largest class has 20 students (!!!) and so far they mostly seem to be paying attention and trying to do the work and understand things.

Speaking of which, I had the BEST class first period today.  Well, all my other classes went well too.  But after first period, I was just flying.  We’re doing basic, beginning physics stuff–relating the slope on a position-vs-time graph to the velocity of an object, talking about having a frame of reference and a defined “start” or “zero” position, and the difference between graphs for things moving away from zero and things moving towards zero.  But I felt like everything went right, I was asking the right questions to bring the kids to realize what it would mean if two object’s graphs had the same slope, or how to tell by eyeballing the graph which of two objects is moving faster.  I asked questions, and then I asked the kids who answered how they knew they had the answer, and they explained it to me!

My other conceptual-level classes went well too, though I was a little giddy by 6th period and those kids clearly wondered what I’d been taking…nothing other than usual, I swear!  (actually, I forgot to take my usual vitamins, antihistamine, and anxiety meds this morning.  Oops!)  And then it came to my AP class.

Ah, my AP class.  Nice kids.  And one of them got into a giggle fit when I was jokingly suggesting reasons my random drawing of lab groups came out the way it did.  We were doing a projectile launch lab today.  It quickly became clear that goggles were a necessity!

This evening, I got to watch one of the funniest movies ever on TV, without commercials.  The Birdcage, with Robin Williams and Nathan Lane.  In case you haven’t seen it, it hilarious, and it is based on La Cage aux Folles, a French film that I am pretty sure my parents took me to see when I was a kid.  I remember that I liked La Cage aux Folles, but I don’t remember anything else about it.

Could a day get any better?  Yes, it would have been better if the music played over the PA system this morning had been better.  Every morning the kids come up with music to play over the school system for about 10 minutes before homeroom officially begins.  Today’s music sounded like awful incomprehensible anime theme songs, and then they played Sandstorm.  Without that, it would have been a perfect day.  Instead, it was only awesome.

;-)

I love my job!

Accomplishments

I promised I would tell you things I had accomplished this summer, to counter the complaints I made on Monday.  First is the collection of sixty (60) jars of pickles, jam, and dessert topping that now live in our basement.  This is not including the jars that we have given away or consumed the contents of, or that I made in a class.  Or the three unused pint jars that are destined to contain pickled beets as of next weekend.  I am honestly amazed to count up all these jars (though my numbers are miniscule compared to Marisa’s):

• 4 8-oz jars blackberries in chambord
• 1 pint jar watermelon rind pickles
• 8 pint jars dill spears
• 7 pint jars bread & butter pickles
• 3 pint jars cucumber relish
• 12 8-oz jars blueberry jam
• 4 8-oz jars peach dessert sauce
• 7 8-oz jars black-and-blue berry jam
• 9 jars raspberry jam (mixed sizes)
• 5 jars peach/berry jam (mixed sizes)

Before this summer, I had never canned anything.  But now I am very much on the bandwagon with everyone else in the “canvolution.”

What else?

I acquired a car to convert to a plug-in electric vehicle.  Thanks, Melissa!  Interestingly, I have already gotten two inquiries about the car from prospective buyers (one a driveway-sealer guy driving by, another from a pizza delivery guy) and a tentative recipient of the engine and transmission (somebody the guy next door knows).  Today my minions and I removed the radiators (there were two!), alternator, spark plugs, a belt, the battery, the fuse box, part of the exhaust, the coolant reservoir, and unhooked much of the wiring.  If only I had minions more often!  But they are all off to college and I am off to vacation, and then I will be in school.  I suggested we might work on the car again the day after Thanksgiving.  We shall see.  I am in touch with the minions on facebook, so hopefully we will manage to accomplish more.

I built a foam-cutter.  This is a wooden platform and a taut, vertical nichome wire that I can pass some electric current through.  The current makes the wire hot, so it can cut through polystyrene foam with ease, and with noxious fumes.  It is only for use in a well-ventilated area.  Then I needed a power supply for the foam cutter, and it ought to be variable- i.e. I want to be able to adjust the voltage continuously from 0V to 12V.  It is only partially constructed, but I have all the parts.  I have a nifty new soldering station that made construction of the power supply (I converted a computer’s ATX power supply) easy peasy!

I went to the library numerous times, read a bunch of books, constructed two jigsaw puzzles, read two e-books on my iPod, caught up on some podcast-listening, organized some stuff in my office better, sorted through several large stacks of paper in my office, fixed up a mobile made by one of my students so that it is much sturdier, acquired some uranium-doped glass marbles, took three teacher workshops (one a week long and two 3-day workshops), foisted cucumbers off on anyone and everyone, had jury duty for a day, took a pickling class, picked quarts and quarts of berries, and made pies!

One thing I managed to do that I am very pleased with is getting a lot of unframed artwork that has been sitting around the house (in one case since we moved in) framed professionally.  One of those pieces has not been sitting around that long, it is a watercolor painting by my dad.  We will hang it in the guest room, but we don’t know which will be the appropriate bit of wall, yet, so in the meantime it is on the futon:

All that and I still found time to lie about on my backside doing sudoku puzzles and watching Law and Order and Bones on TV. Which explains why three major projects aren’t finished yet…and I am going on vacation tomorrow!  I will come back and have three days to get my act together before school inservices begin!  ACK!

There is a first time for everything

Inspired by the plastic-shopping-bag-full of cucumbers my husband brought in from the garden yesterday and Marisa’s facebook-status-via-twitter about making bread and butter pickles, I made my first pickles today.

I used the recipe from Slashfood that Marisa pointed me to.  First, I needed jars, which I got at the supermarket. The cashier was very surprised that the store even sold canning jars, and then it turned out that the UPC code wasn’t in the scanner and so I was the cause of the Express Lane being held up because the cashier had to send a bagger for a price check.  I felt guilty, though it wasn’t my fault.

Then, there was the cutting and slicing.  Thank goodness for the mandoline, but man, those onions made tears and mucus run down my face like a waterfall!  Here’s my sliced veggies, before and after being mixed with salt and soaked in an ice bath for three hours:

The next step was sterilizing the washed jars and heating the veggies in the brine.  The brine tasted just right for bread and butter pickles, so I think I did it right.

Finally, here are my jars of pickles!

I actually made eight jars, and I plan to do four more tomorrow, because I have enough cucumbers for at least another half recipe.  Guess what you are getting for Christmas?

Zumba

This year, a kid graduated from my high school who was from Brazil.  I taught him when he was a junior, and I urged him for months to take a second year of physics.  He’s interested in art and technology, and I argued passionately that a better understanding of physics would enable him to execute his visions.

But this isn’t about him.  It’s about his mom, Sandra, who came to my school twice a week all spring to teach Zumba.

She’s the perky, ponytailed, energetic aerobics teacher you remember from the 1980’s, except she’s in her 40’s not her 20’s.  Petite and with a brilliant smile, she exudes enthusiasm for Zumba.

Zumba?  It’s danceaerobics to “Latin” music.  It’s samba, and merengue, and cumbia, and the occasional tango or cha cha cha, with arm waving, substantial abdominals, and sometimes shouting.  I love the music, and I love learning a dance, so it is perfect for me.

The first class I went to I emerged drenched in sweat and totally wiped out.  By the end of the school year I was much better – both at doing the steps and at making it through a whole class.  I liked to check the clock when I felt like class should be nearly over…I started checking at 15 minutes into the class, and the time I checked got later and later, until I would look up to find the hour nearly gone!

Sandra loved watching us improve as the weeks went by, often lamenting that she hadn’t videotaped those first few classes to compare us at the beginning and at the end.  I loved the feeling I got every time I mastered another movement.

I’ve taken movement classes of various types since I was a kid, taking folk dance and ballroom dance from a guy we knew from church, taking aerobics with my mom at her office after school, taking folk dance and Scottish Country Dance in college, learning contra and English Country Dance along the way.  I’ve taken lessons in waltz, swing, snoa, and tango at various festivals and events.  I’ve picked up hambo and zwiefacher, schottische, various polka styles, two-step and morris at various times and places.  I’ve done t’ai chi several times in at least two different styles (William C. C. Chen and traditional Yang form).  And of course there is Dance Dance Revolution!

If I had to rank Zumba, it would be near the top of my list.  The music is great and we do whole songs.  There is no criticism of style, everyone does as best they can up to their own flexibility and energy.  There is no partner to try to keep up with, no special costume, no score, and Sandra never told anyone they were doing it wrong.  She did get a huge grin when one of us finally got a tricky move, though!

There is plenty of “Zumba wear” you can buy, despite the “no particular costume.”  Sandra teaches several classes a week (including chair Zumba for people in retirement homes who are stuck in chairs, and she is working on water Zumba) and has many different Zumba outfits, mostly with capri pants with little ties on the back pocket flaps.  The ladies in the class joked all spring about coming in with strings on our rears, to wave as we moved our hips to the beat.  For our last class of the year I wore shorts with button-flap back pockets, and tied ribbons in the buttonholes.  The other ladies loved it!

Sandra gave all of us CD’s of our regular workout music to bring home and practice over the summer, and it is great for getting energized to do the dishes or clean the bathroom.  However, it is very hard to keep from dancing while cleaning with the music on!

Zumba love, everyone!

Transformation

I apologize for falling behind so much in blog posting, but I plan catch up now that I am on vacation.  There is an old saw that says the best things about being a teacher are June, July, and August, but I think of it as just a different phase in the yearly cycle. Now is when I get all those weekends back that I spent at Physics Olympics or Science Bowl or writing tests and getting mad at Microsoft Word, or fretting about all the stuff I had to get done.  Now is when I can stay up late enough to go out and see friends, and watch movies from my Netflix queue, and do jigsaw puzzles!  I can do more sewing projects and MAYBE, just MAYBE, organize my school files for next year.

But that is not what I want to talk about.  I want to show off our garden, with some “before and after” photos and praise for my husband, who is tickled to be growing things he can eat.  Never mind that he is growing a lot of cucumbers, which he does not eat all that much of.  He told me this morning I could make pickles.  Shyeah.

Anyway, remember that “cosmetic surgery” photo of the roses?  Here is the “before and after:”

You’ll note the giant squash plant in the foreground.  We’re doing a modified “three sisters” form of agriculture, apparently – call it two sisters and a cousin.  Squash, beans, and roses.  Though rather than try to pick beans out of the rosebushes, my husband has stuck some bamboo poles in the ground for them to climb.

Also, remember the peas that looked like mini-marshmallows?  Here’s another before and after:

In between the rows of peas are my radishes and a surprise hosta.  The peas are quite tasty, though we only get a few at a time.  Here is a pea closeup:

This photo makes me hungry.  Or maybe it’s just that I’ve spent the morning getting things accomplished, and it’s getting towards elevenses!

Things I can check off my list:

• Take winter wool clothing to the dry cleaner
• Take mail to the mailbox
• Remove growth of weeds from the curb in front of house
• Remove dead blossoms from roses
• Lop branches that overhang the stoop so it’s easier to avoid being soaked when coming in the front door (we’ve been getting a lot of rain lately, non-local readers)
• Clean out refrigerator of old leftovers
• Vacuum unfinished portion of the basement (where the cat’s box is – it had gotten so I didn’t want to walk past in bare feet)
• Write a blog post!

Yep, I think I deserve lunch now!

Food for grumpy

Hi, I’m back.

Grumpy is me.  This is my dinner.

Today was one of 6 days this century when the date is written (here in the US) as three consecutive odd numbers.  05/07/09.  So, it was an “odd day.”  It was unusual for me in several respects.

Since Monday, I’ve been dizzy and I can hear myself blinking.  It’s probably because I didn’t bother getting a new prescription for Lexapro and I ran out of it last week.  But it sure is odd!  I can only hear the blinking when it is quiet enough in the room, and then it is a faint “tsst” corresponding to the electrical impulses in the muscles that move when I blink.  In retrospect, I think my doctor might have warned me not to stop taking my meds abruptly.  But when I quit taking Zoloft over 10 years ago I had no symptoms, and I was clueless that this might happen.

I was supposed to be in a focus group this evening, and I stayed at school late so I could drive straight there from school without having a useless 20 minutes at home.  On the drive, I ran over an “S hook” and punctured a tire.  Rear passenger side.  It stayed inflated long enough for me to pull into a parking lot, and deflated spectacularly when I pulled the hook out.  The hook isn’t even sharp!  Pressure = force over area, indeed.  But it was late enough that after I finished replacing the flat with the emergency spare and made it to a garage, the garages were either closed or had enough work to take them through to closing.  One offered to take the tire and patch it first thing in the morning, but for some reason garages never open as early as I go to work.  I WOULD have left the car, but having made a doctor appointment for tomorrow (the dizziness is getting pretty annoying, actually) that requires me to leave work early means that getting a ride from another teacher doesn’t work.  So I will drive to school and back tomorrow on the emergency spare, which I am not happy about, but whatever.

Since I had planned to be in the focus group all evening and they were supposed to feed me and pay me $75, we hadn’t planned on dinner tonight.  My wonderful, comforting husband (after I called him about my change of plans) had put on the rice cooker, since rice is very comforting.  But I got home HUNGRY and the rice wasn’t done.  So I  opened the fridge.

Oh, fortune!

I found the remainder of a can of white beans (left over from the Cinco de Mayo quesadillas I made Tuesday), the remainder of a jar of artichoke hearts (the rest had gone into pasta, and I think a pizza too), a packet of baby carrots (courtesy of Keiko’s visit weeks ago and still hiding in the fridge), some old but still crispy celery, part of a vidalia onion, and part of a bag of spinach (I think most of it was in the lasagne we had on Sunday).  Pile it all in a bowl, chopped into small pieces (the beans are small enough already).  Add parsley, salt, pepper, red wine vinegar, olive oil, and STIR.

Grumpy had dinner, and didn’t share.

I’m feeling less grumpy now, and I think it is past time for bed already.