Goodbye '15

SHORT CIRCUIT:  So, we have this awesome old stove. It's a Hotpoint Hallmark, from 1965. It looks just like the one in this great, vintage ad.

Recently, when I was in the midst of baking a million Christmas cookies, one of the burners turned itself on. High. Really high. And stayed on - even though its control switch was off, and after I turned everything else on the stove off. Not good.

For the past two days, Christian has spent several hours getting to know the ol' Hallmark intimately. It's a gorgeous old thing, inside and out. I love looking at the 50-year old knobs and gears and wires, and this great diagram on a panel of the unit.

As he was checking it out, Christian discovered a tiny cardboard insulator had slipped out of place behind the knob for the rogue burner. He glued it back in place, put the element back in and it seems to be working properly now.

As long as he had it all opened up, he checked out a few other things, like the 'thrift' oven's bottom element, which hasn't worked in the 10 or so years since we got the appliance for free off Craigslist. 

When Christian started muttering about circuits and resistance and knowing what was wrong, I made him stop and start over, this time with the kids on hand to get a lesson in electricity.

I love impromptu lessons!

FINDERS, SEEKERS:  This morning, we took a short stroll up our hill to pick up a lovely little item that was gifted to us by a stranger, via the wonderful "Buy Nothing" group we participate in on Facebook. After we picked up the gift, we decided to walk a different way back home, down the steep street called Dravus. We had nearly reached our street when I looked down and saw something. At first I thought it was just a cellophane wrapper, maybe off a cigarette pack or something, but as I bent down to pick it up I could see it was a tiny wallet  - with credit cards, a driver's license, a bus pass and a couple of wads of cash. 

We immediately checked the address and saw it wasn't from our neighborhood. Bummer. So, we hot footed it home and did what anyone would do these days - go on social media and see if we could find the woman. We did locate a Facebook account, but it also was clear she wasn't on Facebook much. I sent her a message anyway, and Christian sent whom we believed to be her brother a message, as well. I also called the credit union which issued her debit card and let them know I had it, and asked them if they could call her and tell her I had her wallet. And then we waited. And waited. We did a little more cyber stalking and came to suspect the address on the ID wasn't necessarily her place, but it was probably her dad's place. It finally got to be about three hours since when we found it, and I wasn't comfortable just sitting on it, so we decided to drive over to her dad's address, about 10 minutes away, and see if we could find her. Fortunately, a man was home at the house, and it was her dad. We told him we had found something of his daughter's and where we'd found it. He said that was by her boyfriend's house, and readily offered the opinion that the boyfriend was a jerk (the word he used isn't family friendly, ha ha). He volunteered to take the wallet, but Christian and I declined to hand it over. We'd decided on that ahead of time because we didn't know her relationship with him. We asked him if he could call his daughter and tell her we had it, and give her our contact info. She didn't pick up right away, but called him right back as he was texting her. Turns out she worked just a few blocks away, and so we took it to her work.

The really funny thing is, she didn't even realize it was lost. She thought she left it at her boyfriend's house. So here we were fretting for hours over the thing, and she wasn't worried at all. Go figure! Anyway, we was happy to have it back and thanked us a bit sheepishly in front of several co-workers. Her dad was very effusive in his thanks.

I think of it as an almost immediate example of paying it forward. If we hadn't been on a walk to go pick up an item a stranger had gifted us, we wouldn't have found that wallet. So really, credit for the whole happy ending goes to the person who gave us the gift!

PLANETARY MATH:  We are *still* working on a picture book we started forever ago about a character from the dwarf planet Pluto. Today, we found ourselves at a point needing to know how long it would take to drive around the Earth as compared to lil' Pluto.

Annabelle was assigned Earth. Her calculations are as follows ...

24,902 miles (the circumference of the equator) / 60 (mph speed) = 415.0333 (# of hours to travel around the equator)415.0333 / 24 (# of hours in a day) = 17.2930555 days to travel around the earth's equator.

CJ was tasked with Pluto math. Here's what he came up with ...

According to solarsystem.nasa.gov, the circumference of Pluto is 4,493.7 miles.In the story, (the characters) are going at 60 miles per hour.To find the amount of hours the journey would take (on Pluto), I divided 4,493.7 by 60 to get 74.895, which can be rounded up to 74.9.To find the amount of days and hours the journey would take, I divided 74.9 by 24 and got 3.1208333.Conclusion: The trip (driving around Pluto) would take 3.1208333 days.

GAME ON: This afternoon we spent a pleasant hour at Cafe Mox, which is part of the greatgame store Card Kingdom. While you're there, they'll let you borrow games from their library to test drive. Today we gave Battle Sheep a go.

It's a strategy game where, basically, you're trying to gain as much real estate as possible. You have to do some mental math and try to figure out your opponents' likely moves in order to get the upper hand. Since I won, I think it's a BRILLIANT game. :)

NYE ON MARS:  Curiosity took a moment of of its busy schedule to send holiday greetings from the surface of the Red Planet. Via Facebook, the Mars Science Laboratory declared, "Happy New Year! May your next trip around the sun be a good one."

BLOWING IN THE WIND: The kids have both had bad colds for what seems like forever now. In recent times, I've seen headlines online about the dangers of blowing one's nose. Today, we finally checked out the claims to go along with that advice.

First, we watched a couple of entertaining guys from the Good Mythical Morning series present a not particularly "science-y" case for not blowing one's nose when you have a cold. https://youtu.be/J74OiTd0Meo

Afterward, we checked out a couple of articles online about the perils of nose blowing, 

including one from the Wall Street Journal in which Dr. Neil Schachter of New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital noted a typical nose blow can generate 10 times as much pressure as sneezing or coughing, and that the greater the pressure, "the more likely it is that some mucus will
shoot into the inflamed and narrowed drainage passageways of your sinuses and spread the infection." If you want to read the blow-by-blow (sorry, couldn't help myself), very science-y paper published in Oxford Journals Clinical Infectious Diseases, follow this link to "Nose Blowing Propels Nasal Fluid into the Paranasal Sinuses" 

http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/2/387.full