dethroned

My in-laws are in town and we've been hitting the Clue board like it's going out of style. I lost by a hair tonight, after giving strategy tips to my opponents the last time I beat them. I've created a family of monsters. These are the notes from only one round of the game.

lights of the city

Thanksgiving break = maximizing our time to cram in several mini-vacations. We went into the big city, where I received my biannual fancy haircut at Vidal Sassoon. My partner saw the temporary post-Impressionist exhibit (on loan from the Musee de Orsey)on display at the De Young museum for the 3rd time in as many weeks (we became members for precisely this reason). I opted out and instead watched ice skaters in Union Square and reveled in my freshly cut hair (which left tiny hairs on my nose, causing temporary alarm (am I becoming a goblin?)).

We went to the iconic City Lights bookstore (Ginsburg!). As we crossed the street, we were honked at. Who does that--We're pedestrians!? Don't worry, I flipped him off, like a real woman.

I was browsing the fiction section when I saw this:

I am in love with the idea of Ulysses. My birthday is Bloomsday, and it makes me feel special. Joyce's dedication to this work is commendable (if not totally narcissistic). But this is downright off. It has been give prime shelf real estate and I am going to express doubt at its appeal for most (read: all) customers. It's not bedtime reading. It does up the intellectual ante for the store though, so kudos, City Lights!

The illuminated books across the street from the bookstore. They are beautiful and fluttery and make the street pretty.


Blurry bus and busy street.


There are many opportunities for high caliber entertainment. I freaking love bright, blinking signs more than just about anything.

tomorrow is free coffee morning at work

Tomorrow is my last day of work before our holiday vacation begins. It is also the day that our school hires a coffee cart for all of the staff in the morning. From 7:30-10:30, I get as many free coffee drinks as I please! I plan on getting at least two (early morning and mid-morning. Cafe mocha!). It's the little things like this that make my current employment reality more enjoyable than my last. I do, of course, realize that in what's commonly referred to (by me) as the "real" working world (like where my brother works), there is a virtual fountain of free food, drinks, time. But teaching is not like that world, and for this world, free coffee is rare and awesome. (Though I did once interview at a school that had a froyo machine.)

someone is a super planner

I'm more of a "read about it while on the plane and hope for the best" kind of vacation planner (see solo Norwegian vacation that started off with a $250/night hotel room, as I had no reservation and the pickings were slim in Oslo). Luckily, I married a planner, who will literally spend months pouring over travel books to construct the most perfect vacation that has ever been taken. These books are just the beginning of his madness (and hugely overdue).

Bucky Balls

Have you ever seen a child's set of building toys and thought, "I wish I could still play with those..."? Well, friends, I present to you Bucky Balls: The Perfectly Acceptable Adult Building Toy. Yes, they are pricey ($30), but satisfying to play with. Not quite as satisfying as building a Lincoln Log cabin or super awesome Lego toy--more like as satisfying as zoning out for thirty minutes while you try to figure out how to make a cube out of strong spherical magnets. It does lack the high frustration quotient of a Rubik's Cube, which is another plus.

wordless wednesday--let's try this thing.

tasmanian devils and mouth cancer

I assigned an endangered species brochure to my APES class. They were to research an animal and make a brochure advocating for that animal. Most students picked the polar bear. One brochure stood out--it was on the Tasmanian devil. I learned so much from that brochure. Did you know that they are currently experiencing an epidemic of mouth cancer? It's spread when they bite each other during fighting and it kills them within 3 years. They become unable to eat, and starve to death. 60% of the population has been destroyed by it. Mouth cancer is causing them to move towards extinction! They could all be gone within 35 years! What the hell is happening here? An adorable mini-bear looking animal is experiencing the grotesque and brutal side of nature? The lovable Tasmanian devil, cartoon mischief maker(!), extinct? Start the prayer chain NOW.

I will not put a picture of a mouth-cancer ridden Tasmanian devil on my blog, but google it and you can see the horror.

whole paycheck strikes again

It’s no coincidence that every time I get paid, I do my weekly shopping at Whole Foods. I feel flush with money and not constrained by a weekly budget that might require me to shop at Safeway. If I were to suddenly start making a million dollars a year, I would probably not be able to save any more money. All of my extra income seems to go to fancy/delicious food/kitchen accessories. Today, while at my local Whole Foods, I almost bought $12.00 worth of egg salad and a $12.99 BPA-free water container for my car (I came to the sudden realization that if I am in need of emergency water, then I have bigger problems than BPA on my hands). I did happen to spy a crunchy kale snack ($7.99) that I could not resist (freeze dried kale with nutritional yeast! What will they come up with next?). I wonder what Oprah’s shopping list/impulse buys look like.

unified understanding of science

I never quite made it to what was going to be my main point in that last post (due to agonizing over the modern state of affairs, as it were), which is thus: I love science, specifically chemistry. If there ever was a branch of science at which I have never been skilled, it would be chemistry. Chemistry--bane of both my high school and college experiences. Chemistry--the science that made me feel bad about myself. Chemistry--my cognitive tormentor. Chemistry--a lifetime struggle with its patterns and symmetry.

This year, I threw myself into the teaching of chemistry and it has created new synaptic pathways! My understanding of how it fits together with nature has grown tremendously. Years of study and work in science (specifically applied chemistry!) did not impart the level of understanding that I feel like I have now. It quite literally feels like a block has been lifted—a breakthrough! I get it now! I know I get it now because of a question I received recently--a student wanted to use sodium iodide for a Halloween trick she found on the web. We didn’t have sodium iodide, but we did have potassium iodide, and though I know nothing about those chemicals (OK, my bad), I did know that potassium would probably react more violently than the sodium, being in the same group, but further down on the periodic table. I knew this! I don’t feel like I knew anything about chemistry before, other than there were periodic trends that I didn’t really know, but someone else might (!).

Teaching is insanely hard on many levels, but look at the rewards—you get smarter, you learn how to deal with the wide range of irrational human emotions and you learn time management like no one’s business! I sort of feel like anyone who gets a PhD should be required to complete one year of teaching their subject in a high school. You learn so much fundamentally about the subject, and also how to present material to students, two things that are sorely lacking in academia. How many crappy, yet brilliant, professors does one have at any given college? I certainly had many, and without fail I always felt as if I had a learning problem. I remember asking an environmental studies professor (who was in the biology department) why logs float down a river (they are so big, shouldn’t they sink!(?)). He told me he didn’t know. If he taught high school science, he would have been able to answer that question (density). So fundamental, yet so far from the brains of smart people who narrow their focus and never really had to explain basic concepts in their life, or on the other hand, just sort of skipped to the specialized PhD level without really getting a grasp on a fundamental understanding of science (totally happens, I know of people like this, but rest assured, no one who reads this blog!).

Questions I have had to answer this year (and it's only November):
Why is the sky blue?
What is gravity?
Why is there wind?
Is emotion matter? (it’s a chemical process in the brain, which is matter. It wouldn’t exist without the brain, but it’s not matter?)
Why do we have an atmosphere?
When are tectonic plates going to stop moving?
What is an alpha particle?
Why are some isotopes of an element so much more abundant than others?
How can you tell, or calculate, whether an isotope of an atom is going to be stable or radioactive?

Bohr and the technicolor atoms

Today the girls burned metal compounds in fire. Lest you think that only teenage boys enjoy burning things, I am here to report that teenage girls are equally excited about the prospect. Any lab involving fire is automatically classified into “good lab, fun class”. Graphing and calculating weighted averages for isotopes are classified as “busy work, boring class”. The key is to mix up the necessary, but boring work, with the fun and exciting labs in just the right proportion. I’d say there has to be one fun thing a week to make a kid feel positively towards a subject.



The flame test lab is one that I, for sure, never did in high school (I don’t remember many fun lab experiences. Conversely, the only experiences I remember are labs.) It’s fun, and it illustrates a really important concept in chemistry—quantized energy. It’s the idea that electrons live at different distances from the nucleus of the atom, rather than randomly around the atom--important discovery in atomic history made by Niels Bohr about 100 years ago (not that long ago, all told). The color of the light given off when you burn a metal is proportional to how far the electron has to move from one orbital to the next. If you burn a copper penny, it will look green. If you burn a copper wire, it will also look green. Copper gives off green light! All elements give off a different color of light. It’s insane to think that kids today literally do high school lab experiments that won Nobel prizes less than 100 years ago. We should be raising the smartest children ever to inhabit the earth!

They can literally see gamma particles emitted from a rock with just dry ice (at Safeway for $10/bag and another Nobel prize winning experiment). Our modern world is so magical! Why can we not yet travel closer to the speed of light? Imagine what Wilson, Bohr or Einstein would have done with all of the knowledge we have now. Instead, children text, play video games and dawdle on Facebook. They dream of being business women, having lots of money and visiting Cancun for their anniversaries. The beauty and magic of nature is lost to other pursuits, and that saddens me. We have but a few good hours in the day and not nearly enough time to ponder everything that we want. So we pick and prioritize, and the internet and Facebook help to winnow our choices down even more. In the end, it’s too much work to keep up the effort of learning and growing, so people stop. They look to Fox News and stop. Learning and understanding are hard pursuits! They take time and dedication! Who has time for that when Facebook beacons and Glee is on and the kids need to be fed? I’m really not judging (OK, maybe the Facebook and Fox News, but not the challenges of life in general).

poop heaven

This summer, I went to an AP workshop to learn how to teach an advanced class. It was great because I learned a lot of stuff about the environment that I did not know, and was exposed to the kinds of labs and activities these kids need to be able to do in order to pass the AP Exam. I’ve never taught an AP class, only remedial classes, and so my teaching barometer needed to be re-calibrated. I do find it ironic and limiting that “teaching to the test” (which some might argue is what is wrong in education today), is exactly what one is supposed to do for an AP class. I am literally supposed to have them practice essays and problems similar to those designed by the College Board. Is anything in life ever simple? Can’t there, just once, be a clear right and wrong? Oh, how I am tormented!

At the workshop, we took a field trip to the LA waste water treatment facility, an event that changed my life for the better. I had never been to such a facility before, and it is AMAZING. I highly recommend that you go, right now, to see what happens to your pee and poop after it leaves your house. It gets filtered, pressed, decontaminated, mixed with bacteria that make it safe again, dehydrated and placed on a truck, where it is shipped to cotton farms as fertilizer, or buried in huge piles to further its decomposition. Along the way, lots of gas is released that is then harnessed for power. What an operation!

Sewage pipes: old concrete ones were being replaced with new plastic ones.


Filtration step 1: this is where all of the “solids” get filtered out from the rest of the water. This is where tampons go (for the record, they should not be flushed down the toilet). One time they found parts of a horse in there.


That was just one of many banks doing the same thing...


I forget what happens here, but it was so well named...


This is water that is not clean enough to drink, but at least doesn’t have poop in it. (I imagine this is the stage where all water in Mexico stops. It looks clean, but absolutely is not, as I, unfortunately, found out this summer)


This is clean and desiccated poop (looks like charcoal)! It’s on a conveyor belt making its way to a truck that will take it far, far away (only to come back into our lives after it has been incorporated into whatever crop they’re using it on. Can’t wait to see you again, old poop molecules!).

wake up in the morning, eat some grits, hit the studio, make some hits

I know I’m supposed to love the 101--highway of pretty vistas, trees and ocean. For some reason, though, I love taking the I-5 through the central valley. It’s probably the CA trip I have done the most and every time it happens, I get filled with excitement. American culture is written into that drive—water rights and the misuse of nature, the globalization of corporate culture and its propaganda, poverty and immigration, red state within a blue. It’s hard not to be contemplative while driving that stretch of watered desert from the bay area to the grapevine, listening to Horchata by Vampire Weekend on a continuous loop. This summer, I took pictures along the way.

princes and paupers

I just spent a riveting 30 minutes reading a Vanity Fair article titled, "Wills and the Real Girl" about Prince William and Kate Middleton. It's pretty boring, except for the amusing operatic turns of phrase used by the author. This is heavy-hitting journalism! My top three are below:

When describing an African vacation:
During the day William worked on the Craig family’s Lewa Wildlife Conservancy. In the evenings he and Kate would sip cocktails and dine alfresco. The post-graduation holiday had been a blissful fortnight.

(BLISSFUL FORTNIGHT!)

When speculating on a possible wedding in 2012:
By then William will be 30, the age at which he famously said he was likely to marry, but will the Queen want to share her diamond year with a wedding as well as the Olympics?

(WILL SHE, for what is a woman without a diamond jubilee all to herself???)

On Will's love interests
Although Kate had been voted the prettiest girl at St. Salvator’s, Carley’s derrière was voted the best at St. Andrews.

(Thank god they both have at least one redeeming quality.)

Thanks Vanity Fair!

Japanese church salmon dinner

For the third year in a row, my mate and I attended an annual salmon dinner at his friend's church. It's nice because it's in swanky Los Altos, and we get about a half pound of salmon. What really seals our attendance is the fact that we always get to go for free.

General feel/scene


Intense feeding


A little choir action


After the event, we tried to buy a toilet seat. The local Target was completely sold out, which was both confusing and alarming at the same time.

80%

I suppose you read the sensationalist headlines about the Pew Forum study that found people who identify as atheists (also Jews) know more about religion than those who identify as Christians? Did you also know that you can take a watered down version of the test they used for their study?



I did pretty well, but my life partner did better--he got a 14, which makes me proud. My search for a test on which I will score higher than him continues (it will probably be math based)!

MBA

The MB Aquarium currently has seahorses, pink flamingos and an awesome exhibit on climate change and the oceans. I have a few pictures of seahorses, and none of the others. I did manage to capture the elusive cuttlefish!

Ora et Labora, Hail Notre Dame!

Working at a religious institution no longer phases me. When I first started working at the all-girl Catholic school, I was a little taken aback by the prayer that preceded our new teacher orientation. It was also strange to literally see all of the students in outfits similar to Britney Spears’ in “hit me baby one more time”. But now, it’s just old hat. I grew up in public schools and had jobs for various government and non-profit institutions that would never incorporate prayer into the daily flow of things. It’s not a big part of the school, and the students try to incorporate prayers from all religions, including the Jewish and Islamic faiths, but still…there are prayers at my job, which takes some getting used to since it’s never been a part of my school or working life. I remember taking a trip to Italy with my friend, Paulina, seeing a nun on the train and being so tickled that she was decked out in her habit and her wedding band (to God). Now I see a nun EVERY DAY! My knowledge of the nun lifestyle has been rounded out and it just seems normal to me now. I’ve been to a nun retirement home (they are very well taken care of and get fancy meals every day, which may or may not include beef barley soup). I’ve heard them speak about education (very eloquent ladies, I might add) and I interact with the nun who volunteers in the library after school. They don’t wear habits (but do wear my mother’s favorite brand of clothing—Alfred Dunner), they do wear their God wedding bands and they seem very happy and intelligent. Nuns are sort of awesome, tender ladies!

Other things about religious private school:
--world religion classes (these girls know more about religion than most people)
--deep and serious commitment to community service
--liturgies with dancing and the wave (for real!)

Interesting to note: I experienced more resistance to the teaching of science from my “rural” public school. I have not had one child express any objection to science at my urban Catholic School.

Little known fact: Catholicism embraces the big bang and evolution (and the progress of science in general). Not controversial to them, dudes! Why is it controversial to other forms of Christianity?

forgotten photos and albert is a philanthropist!

I totally forgot a few pictures of the NorCal Ren Faire. My camera's clock setting are off, so these were in a differently dated folder.

There was a real-live dragon!


Awesome swing


Possible future pet


This year, I got super excited about NaBloPoMo and actually read the e-mail announcing this year's blog-o-rama. So excited was I, that I decided to donate a prize to NaBloPoMo. Given my current profession (science pontificator) and general sensibilities, I thought it would be totally awesome to donate a variety of stickers, rainbow peepholes and eclipse glasses to a fellow blogger. I became a little self-conscious when I noticed that other people donated things like $50 gift certificates. I felt sort of like the kid who brings a book to a birthday party, rather than a shiny and/or plastic toy with moving parts. Then I saw rainbow peepholes in a store going for .75/hole and eclipse glasses for $2. My prize rose from the ashes like the mighty (Harry Potter) Phoenix! It is good (or worth at least 20 bucks on the free market).

I donated in the name of my beloved pound puppy, Albert.

Merry Wives of Windsor

We went to the Nor Cal Ren Faire again this year and made a startling discovery: going two years in a row makes the faire lose its magic. We love it there! Jousting, turkey legs, ample cleavage, fencing, faerie art! Honestly, what's not to love about that place. But the thing is, it's exactly the same from year to year, so if you don't mellow out for a season or two and put some distance between yourself and the event, then you remember too much. There is nothing unexpected. I think all of the booths were even in the EXACT same places as last year. Nonetheless, we went, ate food, watched belly dancers and saw awesome t shirts.

secret treats

Today I walked into the faculty lounge to find a lone cupcake with wet brown icing, orange sprinkles and a Halloween themed wrapper staring me directly in the face. I was alone, and as I looked at the singular cupcake resting in the abyss of the table, I thought of many things. I felt guilt for wanting to have it, when there would be no more. I felt excitement in the possibility that I COULD have it. I felt curiosity about its taste and consistency. Mostly, I felt the desire to give in to my excitement and curiosity. In the end, I took it and made my way quickly out of the lounge in an effort to avoid being seen alone, eating the cupcake in the faculty lounge. What if the bearer of the cupcakes saw me being so callous towards my co-workers? What if a colleague saw me stuffing it into my face? (embarrassing) What if it wasn't for anyone at all, but a gift left behind?

As I made my way to the elevator, my mind was flooded with a memory long repressed. I remembered facing a similar dilemma while in Maine. That time, I walked down to the secretary's office and found three plates of cookies displaying their cargo with a welcoming arrangement. No one was around to acquaint me with the cookies, and so I decided to sample each. I walked quickly back to my office, where I consumed them as I surfed the internet, taking note of a particularly greasy/dense one. A few hours later, I went back to the secretary's office in an attempt to deftly swoop up another round (no one saw me eat the first ones! Gaming the system!). While chatting with the secretary, she excitedly told me about her culinary creations, including the greasy and dense one that was created for the sole purpose of getting rid of old deer meat. Sometimes I really miss Maine.

Everything is OK at the Santa Cruz boardwalk

The best place ever invented--just look at that pirate mural! Really bad food (deep fried main courses and desserts), rides and games, beach and ocean. We never go for long, and we usually just take one spin on the sky ride that goes over the whole boardwalk and then play air hockey and laser tag (with teenagers who I routinely beat, causing them much cognitive dissonance. I take the game very seriously, though you probably can't tell by looking at me, which always works to my advantage). We go there a lot when we want to feel happy. It's now closed for the winter, and so alternatives have to be found, like elephant seals, Mt. Hamilton and Monterey.