I was declared teacher of the week this morning on the morning announcements!  I think it will also be announced at tonight’s football game.  There is a box in the main office at school, and you can put in nominations for teacher of the week or student of the week.  You fill out a form with your name, the name of your nominee, and why you nominate them.

Two students told me they nominated me.  I was commended on my spirit and creativity…in other words, my spirit week costumes.  It was nice to be honored.  No prize, though, just the announcement.  That’s OK, I treated myself to a “blood orange margarita” at dinner at Bertucci’s tonight.  Not a real margarita, but tasty and definitely alcoholic.  A reward for all the hard work grading I did this week.  I put in a lot of hours, and ignored other things…and this weekend I will need to put in the hours on other things.  Starting with the several days’ worth of dishes that haven’t gotten washed.

Ah well.  I win!  And I get to wash dishes!

This is a Queensland Blue squash, which we got (of course) in our CSA share.  This particular one seems more green than blue, but I was able to get the blue tinge in the photo by using bright overcast daylight lighting.  This photo does not show the size well, so here is the squash with the universal squash size indicator, Buzz:

He’s clearly thinking, “another squash? Gimme a break!  I’m trying to nap here.”

I decided to make soup with this squash, and I found a recipe on Messy and Picky’s blog. Picky (the author of this particular post) neglected to mention that the seeds are very tenacious in these things, and I think he grossly underestimated the time needed in a 400-degree oven to become soft.  If that was 40 minutes, I’m a shoe.  Here are the chunks before cooking:

In turn, I neglected some of the steps in the recipe (stopping to take photos of chopped veggies) and I used an immersion blender instead of a food processor for pureeing.  I have done the food-processor method, and I have done the blender method, and I can tell you that getting hot pureed soup all over the kitchen and oneself is doubly bad: both painfully hot and tedious to clean up!  The immersion blender is AWESOME (thanks mom and dad!)!!!!

Finally, I topped my soup with some toasted seeds from the squash and from the pumpkin I carved earlier (see previous post).  My husband is not a big soup fan, but I LOVE soup, and this stuff is indeed delicious!

This year, I built a Larson scanner from the EMSL kit, and installed it in my pumpkin.

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!

The University of Florida briefly had an emergency preparedness plan for “zombie attack” on their website.  It’s gone, now, but the document is still available.  You can click through to it from this article.

I’ve never been much of a zombie fan, myself, nor vampires or werewolves.  I am a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and other Joss Whedon creations.  But I don’t care for the Harry Potter books.

What I do like, is dragons.

I have a lot of them.  I have plush dragons, iron dragons, gold filigree dragon earrings, old drawings I did in high school of dragons, dragon socks.  So I really don’t need anymore.

I’m not interested in unicorns, winged horses, gryphons, centaurs (despite the centaur being my high school’s mascot), or other mythical creatures.  Just dragons.

I’m a little surprised by how much I still like them.

What odd thing do you like?

Catch and release: it’s really easy when you are talking about a turtle.  1. Approach turtle.  2. Pick up turtle.  3. Set down turtle.

I was walking home from the train after church and I saw it crossing the road…and there were two cars about a block away and heading toward it!  So I picked it up, put it on the sidewalk (on the side it was heading towards) and put it down.

About halfway home from the turtle, I had the thought that I should have brought it home with me, then made posters proclaiming “FOUND: TURTLE” with a photo and posted them in the neighborhood.  But I didn’t.  I wonder if it was looking for some mud to bury itself in for the winter?

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!

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

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!

Tonight is my last night without grading.  At least, until June, approximately.  I will be collecting lab reports from all four of my classes tomorrow.

Tomorrow is a big day.

In addition to all those kids handing in lab reports (I am hanging out online right now in case they have any questions to e-mail me), tomorrow is the first meeting of the Eastern Electric Vehicle Club that I will attend, having joined over the summer.  I hope to learn a lot!  And, tomorrow is the day Beatles Rock Band is released, along with the re-mastered re-release of the entire Beatles catalog.  My husband is giddy with anticipation.  I am playing Beatles on my iPod to get the songs into my head, in preparation.  Oh yeah, I also have a meeting after school tomorrow and it is the day we’ll get out CSA delivery this week, since Monday was a holiday.

So what have I been doing with my “free” evening?  Browsing the internet for fun links:

• Properties of cat matter at EMSL
• Amazing images of portions of Earth (via Swans on Tea)
• A recipe for cheddar-apple pie from Mac & Cheese
• Janna Levin explains the history of the universe, via Twisted Physics
• Funny reviews for milk and uranium ore available through Amazon.com

Enjoy!