surely there was something

i just dont remember now …

playschool chemistry …

So we hit the midnight madness sale at Goodwill yesterday. I went right at 8 pm when the place was a madhouse. Soaked in the atmoshpere for a while, but nothing caught my eye (other than the line going all the way to the back of the store) so I left as I came. DH went around 11 pm and returned home with an adorable desk for DC. This morning she couldn’t wait to play her new favourite game, “school,” making up instructions as she went along. Of course part of the game was that I was the instructor so there was a delicate balance.

We were signed up for a “Chemistry” program at the library today so I said that one of our lessons would be an intro to Chem. I really had nothing in mind so I just started with solid – liquid – gas, a set of concepts which is not entirely new to her, as we have played games before of naming objects and saying which of these three each one is. As I brought up the concepts of solid, liquid and gas again, she immediately remarked that this applied even to planets.

Now I vaguely remembered that the name of this library program contained the word “Fizz.” SO I imagined some fizzy chemical reactions and tried to tell her something to prepare her for seeing this not as a magic show but as a science demo. SO i started along the lines of “Sometimes when we put two things together they turn into other things.”

She couldn’t wait. She was bursting with revelation: “yes, like when rocks crash together, they can become planets!” We mulled over this for some time.

I then asked her for an example of a solid. Imagine my delight when she said “popsicle” … perfect example to talk about things changing from liquid to solid and back.
She described the process in meticulous detail. I had only asked her to tell me about how the juice becomes a popsicle. No sooner had she finished this than she lit up and said, “AND … ” and went on to describe how that popsicle melted back into a liquid.
She continued, racing to keep up with her thoughts, “Ice cream is also a solid, but it is different from a popsicle, because you can scoop it with a spoon and it also becomes a liquid faster than a popsicle because the popsicle is made of a smoother liquid than ice cream is. You can bite an ice cream but you can only lick a popsicle. But you can only small bites of a popsicle after it becomes a little bit soft.”

How to Rig an Election

hmm … I was with him, even rooting for him, till the end.  What does he mean, “what are you going to do about it?”

Sure we should be less influenced by direct mail, now that we know how dirty most of it is.  But shouldn’t they clean up their act? Is it okay for them to keep on sending junk as long as voters are aware it is junk?