Why didn't I have a basketball scholarship?

One of the true joys of being a professor of physics is that it's my job to throw, smash, shoot, and otherwise have fun with things that, say, an English professor would never get to do.

Wednesday I was swinging a wooden ball tied to a piece of string (about 400 grams ~ 1 pound) around my head to demonstrate centripetal acceleration. I then realized, while whipping this around in front of the class, that the string I'd used was some old kite string I'd found in the lab. I quickly calculated that the likelihood of the string breaking and the ball flying through the air and smacking someone was high. Since we had also just calculated that it was moving about 6 m/s (~13 mph or so), I quickly stopped swinging it around. Later in Help Center, I couldn't resist playing with it again (spinning it vertically this time). Of course, the string broke! Fortunately it broke near the floor and it rolled harmlessly into the back of the room. Disaster averted!

Today I was talking about how gravity can act as a centripetal force. (Side note - centripetal means almost literally "center-seeking" - it's the force/acceleration that changes the direction of motion of an object.) Usually we talk about this in terms of orbits. But, I wanted to show them that we'd already talked about this earlier in the semester when we did projectile motion. In my zeal, I threw an eraser across the room. This is a big lecture hall. I was like 30 feet from the wall. Against the wall was a trash can. I just threw the eraser, aiming only enough to avoid hitting students (which I've nearly done this semester already). After throwing it I started talking again, but out of the corner of my eye I see I have just made a perfect swish into the trash can with the eraser!!!!! I actually got an ovation for it. Okay, it wasn't standing, but hey this is a physics lecture, you can't ask for too much! It was so clearly a miracle that I almost called it a day there. I probably couldn't do that again in a 100 years even if I tried.

I'm now going to be extra careful as I've clearly used up all the luck I was alotted in my life. I found and married Megan, and then I made a 30 foot shot with an eraser without trying.

Might as well close up shop - show's over. :-)

Camping

Megan and I went camping this weekend at Rocky Knob, one of my favorite campgrounds on the Blue Ridge Parkway. We had a nice time barring some minor problems.

1. It was windy. Really windy. Really really windy. We got virtually no sleep on Friday night as we laid there waiting for the airplane to hurry up and take off. Or a tree to fall on us.
   
2. Tied with the wind for fun was the air mattress. Yes, when you're car camping you can really camp in what is probably an overly luxurious manner. So we have a queen size air mattress we bring with us and inflate. And in this case, inflate again. And again. Yep, about every 3 hours. Fortunately, we were already awake from the wind or it would have really been a downer. Later Saturday, we spent some time driving to buy a new air mattress.
   

We did learn another thing. If you have a pound of hamburger and are planning to make coal burgers, you should really just make 4 and not 2 burgers. The cheese/meat ratio is all wrong with 1/2 lb burgers. Oh, and that's also a lot of meat.

Other than that we mostly lazed around, swinging in our hammocks (thanks Brian and Teresa - those really add to the luxuriousness of the camping experience).

To finish up our luxury camp, Erin, Megan's sister, bought me a small camp espresso pot. This was its first outing. I didn't follow directions (duh - I'm a guy) and I apparently wasn't supposed to tamp the coffee in (like one would for every other espresso maker in the world). Let's just say it was a little bit strong.

Thanks Megan

I just wanted to thank Megan for:

1. posting the pictures of the new appliances (the dishwasher, which no pictures were taken of, looks just like the refrigerator and stove, only more dishwasher-like);
2. posting pictures of the jelly making process;
3. posting pictures of me making jelly, while sick; and
   
4. posting pictures of me making jelly, while sick, and in my "comfort" clothes.

At least she did so on "Talk Like a Pirate" day as in the last picture, the glare on my glasses makes me look like I accidentally poked my right eye out with my hook! Arrrgh ye' matey!

:-)

Shiny Objects

All girls like shiny objects, and I suppose I'm not any different. In this case, stainless steel makes more of a general glare than a sparkle, but in the form of large kitchen appliances, it's shiny enough to qualify as an "oooh pretty" in my book. The new appliances look great and we christened the stove and fridge by making yet another batch of grape jelly. I haven't had the jelly yet, but the italian ices Brett made have been to die for!

This time we got the process right. In case anyone has any questions about grape jelly making, let me stop here and say:

1. You CANNOT make a double batch of jelly. Just because you have a pot big enough to hold it doesn't mean it is meant to happen. This also applies if you think you can make triple and quadruple batches because you have large pots from beer making like, say, we do. You can only make a single batch at a time or the jelly comes out as syrup because there's no "jell" to it.

2. Jar lids are destined to enter a parallel universe. Apparently they are somehow related to socks. You know how you just "knew" you put an even number of socks in the wash and still ended up with one short? Yeah. Same with jar lids. I mean, it's not complicated...you have X jars and X screw on rings and X lids. And somehow we ended up with X jars, X-1 rings, and X-2 lids. Where DO these things go and are they actually useful when they get there?

3. Given that "jell" was lacking, we started adding more pectin this time around. This is good. You can dip a spoon into ice water and then into the boiling mixture and then back in the icewater to see how much it jells and get a feel for when you've added "enough". You really can't add too much pectin. Some of our jars of jelly can actually stand up, salute the flag, and vote Republican. They're jelling more than those Dr. Scholl's inserts. And that's just fine by me!

Now, with lessons learned, we continued on with our jelly making on our new stove...even having a quick scare when one pot boiled over with no notice and we had grape syrup boiling on the stove top. Luckily we had lots of Ceramibryte and no permenant etching or discoloration of the cooktop resulted.

And here's what you've all been waiting for...the pictures!

Our tree - a photo of the trunk

Today I remembered to take the camera to work. When I got there, they were busy cutting down the the pieces to a small(er) size and hauling it away. Actually, they were hauling away pieces still when I left work at 4:30 today.

Anyway, here's a picture of the trunk. It's hard to tell, since I failed to get anything in frame that could give a sense of scale. So, I'll just tell you that that trunk is at least 5 feet in diameter. Does that look like a tree that's gonna come down soon?

Our tree is gone...

Okay, it's not really our tree, but the gigantic oak we took our engagement pictures in front of was just taken down yesterday. Today, there's nothing left but a stump. I wish I'd had the camera with me, but I don't regularly carry it with me to work! Apparently they (whoever "they" are - I'm guessing some university-employed risk assessors) decided that the tree was unsafe. Okay, yes it's between two buildings, mine and the library. Yes, if it decided to fall over, it would probably do some damage to the library. So, was it at risk? I saw the trunk, in pieces, after they had cut it up into manageable sections. The core was rotten. By core I mean about a 1 foot diameter section. There was a thickness of significantly more than a foot surrounding this core the whole circumference of the trunk! If we were to model this tree as a straw, you would have an opening less than half the radius of the straw!!!! It clearly had lots more life in it (no, it didn't have any obvious diseases - it was healthy in appearance over all its branches - I am just a layman though).

We'll miss having that tree around. It was a reminder of the start of our lives together and we liked the idea of having something so old and great at our beginning. Farewell tall oak!


PS - We'll have pictures of our new appliances up soon, if we can bear the embarrassment of how bad our old cabinets look with the new appliances. More incentive to get the kitchen done I guess.

PPS - Megan has some good pics of Calvin and Diana around the house I'm sure she'll post at some point. Probably when she gets over the cold I gave her.

What I didn't think I'd be doing today

This could be a strange blog. I mean, there were lots of things I didn't think I'd be doing today. I didn't think I'd fly to the moon today. I didn't think I'd be driving a Ferrari. These are nice daydreams and they're not what I planned to do today (unfortunately), but in a million years I wouldn't have come up with what did actually happen today.

When I woke up this morning, I thought I'd go to work, do my office hours, get some stuff accomplished and ready for the weekend. I was feeling a little sick today, but nothing too terrible.

I come back from lunch with Rhett (who's recovering nicely from his bike accident thank you very much), sit down and my phone rings. Huh, that was good timing. I pick up and the conversation goes like this (with Megan).

"Hello."
"Hey, how's it going?"
"Fine, what's up?"
"Um, you know how our refrigerator is making (new) noises? And how we can't use the energy miser setting any more? And how we were sure that it was going to be the first appliance to die in the kitchen?"

At this point, you should now insert groans and a sudden increase in my brain activity as I try to determine how much it's going to cost to fix or replace our frig which has been acting up. Now back to our conversation.

"Here - listen to this." The phone is quiet for a second, and then I hear a loud motor (pump I think, but it's over the phone so I can't be sure - I should embed a sound file or something). Megan gets back on. "That was the dishwasher."

At this point, my brain again starts to spin. See I had already calculated things based on replacing a refrigerator, not a dishwasher. While there was some relief it was the dishwasher and not the frig, it wasn't so great that I felt big warm fuzzys or anything.

"Wow - that sounds bad," I said.
"Yeah - there's no water in the dishwasher either."
"So, you wanna go to Lowe's tonight?"
"Yeah, I guess so."

See, we hate our dishwasher (we hate our frig too, but that's a separate issue.... or is it?). It's bisque. Why is it bisque when everything else in the kitchen is white? That's a darn good question. We don't know - someone else put it in and the darn thing (used to) work and we didn't bother replacing it just to get the right color. Oh yeah, did I mention neither of us like white appliances anyway? No? Okay - we don't like white appliances.

I got through the rest of a long day (who knew students would have so many questions). I headed home just as it started to rain (if you haven't been keeping up lately with the weather, we've had a lot of rain here). Great - no mowing the lawn today. Guess I can focus on the dishwasher. After arriving at home, we decide it's time to head over to Lowe's and see what's what.

At this point in our story, I suppose it'd be helpful to note that Megan and I would like to redo our kitchen. The cabinetry is original and not of the greatest construction for one thing. For another, there's nice hardwood floors in the kitchen. Unfortunately, they're underneath a layer of plywood and some really great sticky tiles. Yes, you know those foot square tiles you peel the paper off and stick down. The ones that stay stuck down for, oh, at least 5 months if you're lucky? Yeah, those are the ones. Yep. The problem of course is money. How does one pay for a total kitchen remodel even if one does most of the work yourselves? Um, we're not sure yet, but it's on our "to do" list.

We head over to Lowe's. We do some wandering around, purposefully staying away from the appliance section. I, at least, was scared to look at the appliances because they have big price tags and we were clearly going to have to pay for one of those price tags. It's fun to look at big ticket items if you don't have to actually buy one! Anyway, we eventually wander over to the appliances and look at the dishwashers. Megan and I both like the stainless look, but we were willing to look at black as well. Remember, while everything's currently white, we'd like to switch out of that. We found a nice dishwasher in stainless though from Frigidaire. We decided that is was both of our favorites and had pretty much decided to get it.

When we looked up, Megan spotted a matching refrigerator that was marked down 35% (yes, you read that correctly). Um, what? We ran over and, trying not to drool too much, gave it the once over. It has a small dent in one side (barely noticeable). We're trying to figure out why on earth it's marked down so far and are running around comparing it to all the other Frigidaire models to see if we can spot some obvious difference. Nope. While doing so we notice a stove like ours (our stove is only 4 years old, but white). It's convection like ours. In fact it's exactly like ours, except it's stainless and matches the dishwasher and refrigerator. And it's marked down $100. Thoughts are tearing through our minds! Would it be crazy to just go ahead and start our kitchen remodel by getting new appliances now? First stop - talk to Lowe's sales guy. We ask said sales guy why the frig is marked down. "It's last year's model and it's the last one - we gotta clear it out before we can put out the new ones. Oh, it's the only one left." We asked about the stove. "Same story - it's the only one left." Oh lord. Now we need to make a decision. Megan points out the dent in the frig and he agrees to take another $100 off! He also points out that if Megan gets a Lowe's credit card (I have one already) that's another 10% off and then we can get 12 months/no interest too. We look at each other. "Sales guy, will you hold these at least until we get some dinner and talk about it? We'll be back tonight." He says sure so we run off for a bite to eat and some serious money talk.

Long story short... we got it all. On Saturday afternoon, we'll be getting a new refrigerator, new dishwasher, and new stove. Matching. In stainless. And I'm still certain I would never have considered this happening today when I woke up. Anybody want an almost new stove (it's white remember) for real cheap?