Dawn’s Thoughts

Well, last Monday (3/16), I went to my appointment at Career Center, and then I suppose I looked for jobs. I can’t remember very well what I did.

Tuesday (3/17), I was supposed to go to internship, but didn’t as my supervisor is off on jury duty. I debated going to Job Club, but as I haven’t yet detremined just how long of an orientation I need to repeat due to funding changes, and as no one there seems to have gotten my messages, I haven’t been in. If orientation is one day I might not mind repeating it for no reason — if it’s the original month and a half, I probably will, especially as job counselors in these organizations have mainly been laid off themselves. This means even if I did repeat orientation, I’d only end up going to job club just as I always have, because there are apparently only volunteers to help with job seeking. It’s rather funny really. So basically I’d be repeating orientation to prove I can do it, then continuing on with what I’ve been doing. Even the people who are supposed to help me with jobs are so out of funding that they don’t have work.

Wednesday (3/18), I went to my appointment at Career Center, to get some help with job keywords. Discussed what I wanted to do with the counselor, and have my homework, which is to pick the person’s brain who thinks I’d make a good vision teacher. I explained that many people have mentioned teaching, but as I would have difficulty writing notes, etc. I’m not sure what I could adapt to be an aide, etc. Because to my knowledge I would be doing the very things I had trouble with in school.

Then I went to PA, seething because of the Traveling Garbage Show.

Imagine whatever you like for that image.

Fun, isn’t it?

So I got home and told Mom on the way, that I was drinking, yes, drinking, even if it was 2 PM. Who cares? It was that kind of day. I had my glass of wine and felt much better. Then I took it easy because I knew getting that pissed (as in mad, not as in British royally drunk) makes me feel awful eventually.

Thursday morning as I was sitting about writing this blog, my friend emailed and told I must apply for this job with folklore she found. Much of my time (except for where I’ve done old-fashioned procrastinating), has been taking up with getting references set up, uploaded, cover letters etc. Exciting job.

March 24 and 25th, Tuesday and Wednesday, I went to job club — all about how to an advocate for yourself — and to internship. Thursday I went to the career center, and worked on my resume. Somehow the counselor and I managed to edit the thing down from 2 pages to 1 page, with suggestions on how to edit further. I’m supposed to put keywords in, but whenever I look at the job description and resume together it gets confusing.

Then I went home, stopping to tour BookBuyers of course and get a rum ball.

They don’t sell them there. It’’s across the street. Boy, that would be cool. Nice but sticky for the books.

I went to PA, propped a box in front of the freezer, which seems to conspire with various other items in the house to be in some kind of disrepair every time I come home. What I had placed in the freezer in a nice small bag had practiced contortionism and catapulted just enough to pop open the door and make winter all over the linoleum.

Now, granted, the freezer is currently stuffed…

…with what, exactly, I’m not entirely sure…

…but any self-respected food should stay where I put it in the freezer, where the sub temperatures should be to its liking. I wanted to go the store and make soup, but didn’t get a chance. I checked the fountains, filled the smaller one with water again so the mosquitoes won’t set up water skiing camps in it, and took care of the garden.

The garden is (finally!) sprouting something!

About 4 Armenian cucumber plants and 2 delicata squash plants have appeared. That’s not counting the tomatoes indoors and the wheatgrass. (I’m trying to keep the wheatgrass inside for fear it’ll cross-pollinate itself and I’ll end up munching the lawn like a cow).

And that’s not counting the strange plant which I thought was a cabbage, which sprouted inside the worm bin. I dragged it out and labeled it cabbage, but it might not be. Anyway, I was just reading about dysentry bacteria growing in crops raised in dung, so possibly eating things from the bin is not a good idea…

I’ve been yanking out and replanting wandering garlics from there, right along. They wind up thick, long, and bigger in the worm bin, but strangely anemic looking from lack of unlight. They pure white and pale yellow when I pull them out, but turn green once they’re with other garlics.

I transplanted the tomatoes outdoors, where immediately they stopped looking cheerful and alive and proceeded to look squashed and dead. Doing that, I unearthed 2 of the soybeans I planted, out of the whole packet. I hope they sprout even if I did disturb them. I planted a few more tricolored garden string beans around the tomatoes and soybeans.

Friday (3/27) I went to a doctor’s appointment at noon. I started out around 7:30 0r 8 Am to get there. Before I got to the train station, I stopped to talk to the green parrot again. This time instead of just listening,  he crouched down and wriggled and poked his beak through the cage while I talked. He said hello right away.

I figured either he wanted food or was doing a mating ritual.

Of course, I was the only one on the street actually having a conversation with the bird, so maybe he’s not used to people talking quite so much. The owners must, though. And no, I don’t know what gender the animal is, really wasn’t paying that much attention, thank you.

Peacockes do mating dances for me too.

But then, they sound like car horns when they get excited. I suppose there’s good reasons why people teach parrots to talk rather than make other sounds.

Went back to PA, hopped over to the nieghbors across the street for the loan of their digital camera, as I figured mine was either in the motor home or the stuff I haven’t unpacked. As it turns out, Dad found it in the motor home, so I don’t have to rummage.

Several kids were over there, and of course chaos reigned, naturally, with small children dashing about with potentionally lethal objects about their heads, and god only knows what was going on in the backyard.

Probably why the adults in SJ used to have wine coolers while supervising.

I was invited to lunch, and later, for dinner. Anyway, it was assumed that I would get the bug book or the science book to be a child wrangler in the backyard, but I said I had too much homework to do and went back across the road. I wasn’t sure when dinner was, and no one came to fetch me, which was just as well, as I was still doing homewrok. By 8 PM I was watching Of Mice and Men (the new version). I still need to see the old one with Lon Chaney, Jr. in it, if nothing else just to see where the “Which way did he go, George? Which way did he go?” came from in Warner Brothers cartoons. Saw some new things in it this time. Tried to tape it — got halfway through and the disc quit.

On Sunday (3/29) I took Outreach to SJ.

Monday I went in the career center during their open career drop ins, which turned out not to be open due to inservice or something. They were kind enough to help me anyway. We edited most of my cover letter and browsed through what I wrote for upload captions. The floor started shaking and that was a 4.3 earthquake, which we were told immediately from someone in the back rooms. I went and stood by the door in case of aftershocks, then went back to work.

After that, I went to the Mexican market and got vegetables and a pound of untwisted chorizo for soup. I made the soup and had it for dinner.

Tuesday (3/31) I went to job club — this time about time management. Got into a discussion about various organizations with one of the clients. Asked about orientation and was told it was 2 pm today. I said I couldn’t do that as I hadn’t told my supervisor I wasn’t coming in. Then after job club I asked about a volunteer helping me next Monday, but I can’t make an appointment until I complete orientation again.

Came back to internship, had a very good lunch at El Sombroso restaurat. Thank God they have free refills. I got a burrito with red chile sauce on top and probably jalapenos in the center. It was good, but I didn’t know there were going to be chiles, and so I had half the burrito, most of the chips, and 3 FULL glasses of horchata.
sat down near the steps to read and found myself quite the center of attention there: taking pictures for tourists, giving directions to City Ha;;’s doorways and having skateboarders zip around me and fall off steps, stunt jumping. When it was time for internship, I went only to find them closed for Cesar Chavez day.

That means, of course, that I didn’t need to dress up today and could have stuck around for the new orientation. Darn it.

I went by school to find them also locked for the holiday, so I couldn’t see what time would be good to drop in or make appointments with professors. I came home and began work on this blog. I suppose if I don’t have to stay Thursday for professor appointments, I coould possibly go home tomorrow. But then, of course, I have to be back on Saturday for the history club field trip to the Steinbeck museum in Salinas, and the Presidio.

That’s what I need to sign up for tomorrow.

On Friday, March 13, I spent the day working looking for jobs. Bookbuyers called and canceled our appointment, explaining that they could not hire anyone because of financial reasons which makes sense. They said nothing personal, that they enjoyed my resume and cover letter and would consider me in future if any jobs came up. Of course, I told them please do. This made me somewhat happy because I got such a quick call back and because my cover letter and resume were useful, even though I am disappointed they couldn’t use me.

Saturday I went to the booksale and bought some things. One book tells how to cook jicama, which I’ve tried unsuccessful in the past. But that book has microwave instructions and I haven’t tried that, only in stews.

Somewhere in this week, possibly Saturday, because I know I was coming back from somewhere at it was likely the booksale, I met the neighbors who asked me to dinner Of course the scientist wanted to do science experiments, but as it was shabbat, we couldn’t. We settled at last on making a paper plate water wheel, which I could do and not break shabbat for them, and I made an extremely uneven water wheel with a pencil. I didn’t measure the cuts, so naturally between the friction from the uneven hole and the uneven slats, the wheel would only turn about halfway under the kitchen faucet. All the children and their mother gathered to see it turn.

Afterwards, when it was 9 PM and time for me to be home vegging, the scientist ran about the house with a carefully cut off section of double-sided suction cup and a soda can. He cut the sides off so that it would stick in odd places where a normal suction cup wouldn;t, which was a good idea. I was worried that the suction cup wouldn’t have enough suction this way. I duct taped it to the soda can, and the scientist ran around attaching it to glass in picture frames, windows, and cabinets in general, while his father watched looking rather bewhildered. The soda can bounced off several times. I noticed that the scientist has now somewhat understands that the suction cup can only be attached firmly to things like windows, which is different from earlier. (Although he still wanted to attach to textured walls). At last I said I needed to go home and explained that I would do science another day when it wasn’t shabbat.

On Sunday around 8 PM, after I had stopped my job searching for the day, here was the scientist and his mother, wanting me to come over for science education. We had decided on several exhibits on shabbat, and found the one about pendulums, which I copied. Meanwhile the scientist wanted to know if I had made my cookie tin banjo and how, and whether I could get the singing toy pig dancing on the piano.

I took the banjo over, returning with it soon after, as everyone wanted to play with it and tune the strings, which meant that it was rapidly getting to a state where I would have to retune, such as it was, so I took it home. I had collected the awful, wonderfully looking knitting string from our house, which turned out to stretch and break. I neglected to follow instructions, though the scientist reminded me several times. Of course, the instructions called for stabbing a ball with a knitting needle, something I can’t safely attempt without injuring me, someone else or throwing the needle.

Instead, I bound the 4 pens together with duct tape. We debated suspending them from the ceiling as instructed by the project, but give this up as the tape would pull all the paint off the ceiling.

Instead, I tied it to the chandeliar. The scientist had the job of cutting any duct tape, finding a large ball to try and weight the pendulum. We taped this to the top, which prompted sent the microphone shaped pendulum into sideways spins.

In between attempts to fix the pendulum, the scientist practiced singing into the microphone.

I found something interesting awhile back with the baking soda experiment. The scientist’s speculation of why couldn’t you just leave the shell in plain water, is, in fact, technically correct. If you left one shell in water and the other in vinegar, you would have a control and an experimental shell. Now I doubt the scientist thought of the two together like that, other than wondering why you get the same effect with water, but those are the right questions to be asking. It’s good to have questions like this, I said then. It’s interesting to watch a 6 or 7 year old thinking about how stuff works.

The pendulum eventually swayed erratically back and forth, propelled only by frequent shoves from the scientist, and only drew when pressed down quite hard.

“Look,” the scientist said, pointing to stock market lines, “we drew on the paper.”

Well, the pendulum was somewhat successful. It did swing, held upright by two strings (to stabilize it from going sideways) and duct taped at odd angles. It didn’t draw nice circles as I wanted, and it didn’t complete any circle under its own power, but it did provide entertainment.

The scientist said he would like to do science all the time.

I’d been cooking quinces on the stove because al the pans were dirty and I found apparently that high boiling the stuff for 3 hours is not the same as in the rock pot for 3 hours, or the oven for 8 hours. Finally, I ate a small piece, although it wasn’t red and done yet. Then of course I thought of all the awful things that could happen to you if you swallowed one raw, though I suppose unripe persimmons are the same way, inedible

Then of course I left them and didn’t notice them again until they burnt spectacularly all over the pan.
Today (March 15), I basically did the dishes, watered the sprouting crops in the back room (tomatoes) and watered the outside garden. I figured out the other day how to tap the worm tea in the worm bin, so I’ve been watering with that and the leftover rain water that completely filled one of the large containers by the garden. That way it won’t become home to mosquitoes and I won’t have to fight with the hose for awhile.

Then I went and caught the train. Several people were grabbing hold of the poles and turning gymnast somersaults with them, which I’ve never seen anyone try to do on the train. They were apparently quite practiced at it.

This kind of thing drives me nuts. In between, naturally, they were shrieking, which is another thing that drives me nuts. I brought Temple Grandin’s book Animals in Translation and I tried very hard to concentrate on that.

The part about visualization and your brain is extremely interesting, mainly because I’ve been thinking about this lately. I have difficulty with proprioperception, where your body is in space. In fact, I’ve been knocking knees, elbows and in general walking into doors quite regularly lately.

So it doesn’t surprise me that I also have problems seeing myself in dreams, or imagining my lungs in my head. I’ve seen drawings of lungs and actual lungs, so picturing a lung in my head should be absolutely no problem. But it is. The odd thing is that I can imagine detailed fictional environments for stories with no difficulty. It makes me wonder if visualizing yourself and visualization in general are located in the same area of the brain. Interesting concept. I’ll have to look it up. Then, again, maybe it’s linked to proprioperception or faulty nerve connections or something.

I worked on job searching a little after I got to the apartment, then worked on this blog. However, due to the wrong time on the clock I missed the TV show I wanted to watch. I discovered the stoves had been on trying to hard boil eggs since at least Tuesday, so I turned that off and threw out the eggs. I’ve also forgotten hot water in the microwave twice now. Only good thing is at least I only have hot plates. I made a pizza for dinner, remembering the first 10 minutes to find it hadn’t defrosted, then popping it back in the oven to burn to a crisp. The timer on the oven doesn’t beep when it’s through, and apparently if I’m not paying attention I don’t notice burning until it’s very burnt. Means I’ll have to pay a lot more attention to what I’m cooking.

Anyway, back to the Holocaust movies I’ve been watching. The intriguing thing about all of them is perspective. The first two, Island on Bird Street and Look to the Sky are somewhat autobiographical. The last, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is fiction. All of them involve narrators aged 3 or 4, or at most 11, all are set in the Holocaust and in most of them the audience knows more about the Holocaust situation than the narrators, who are trying to adapt.

In Island on Bird Street, a boy reads Robinson Crusoe and sees his hiding place in a ghetto as an adventure. (How do I get food, shelter, etc?). He doesn’t know where his father went.

In Look to the Sky, a boy travels with his mother to a concentration camp. When they’re first taken away from home, he refuses to leave without his tricycle and rushes back to get it. He doesn’t see this move as dangerous because he’s something like 3 or 4 at the time. When he’s 8 or so, friends at the concentration camp dare him to make gestures at guards and visit the “monastry” where the dead are kept. [All dares I would never expect to see in a camp because I didn’t know there was enough free time for children to act like children]. His mother’s perspective is that he could be killed, or pick up typhoid or other disease from the “monastry,” but although he’s panic stricken about being locked in the monastry itself, he relates what he did matter-of-factly (I completed the dare. The people were dead and this is normal]. This is a book I’ll have to look up.
In The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, the perspective is really there in front of the audience. In the movie, you see only what the boy sees and hear only what he hears. His dad is a soldier. And there are these funny people next to the house that wear striped pajamas all day and work on a farm. [It’s interesting to look at the time differences in this movie. The boy and his friends run around in the middle of town pretending to be airplanes. If you were nine years old today and tried that, people would stare at you. It’s like when I watched I know my First Name is Steven on TV. The first thought in my head was what is a seven year old doing walking home alone. It wouldn’t happen today. When I’ve read comments about the movie Changeling, someone said well, the mother left her kid home alone for the day and he’s nine, so naturally he got kidnapped. By nine today you might be able to stay by yourself but I don’t think people in the 1930’s saw this the same way we do today. Folks in factories were leaving their 6 year olds in charge during the same time period. And also if people wore striped pajamas like in Goodnight Mister Tom regualrly in the 1940’s, you could interpret clothing this way. But today pajamas aren’t traditionaly striped like this and a modern interpretation would be different]. Anyway, some parts of this movie would only be possible if you didn’t notice current events (and it seems like if you were playing airplanes, you probably wouldn’t care much what was going on in town), and also if your parents never brought their work home with them. Since you don’t hear the parents in the movie saying “no way will that kid join the Hitler Youth or salute, etc.” it makes you wonder. However, things like this seem to be delibrately missing, so that the perspective is kept (of course Dad always does the right thing since he’s dad). The ending was surprising, but exactly opposite of what you would expect. The only problem is, the parents wouldn’t feel guilty for the reasons a person today would expect. You might say “Why, didn’t I watch him more closely?” but I don’t think you would say, “My child is a child like these folks over here, and therefore we shouldn’t have…”

I got the book at the library and it’s as if Dr. Seuss and A.A. Milne got togehter to write a book about the Holocaust. I mean that respectfully. The book is labeled a fable, and it’s written like one. It does a lot of the same things the Winnie the Pooh books do (misunderstanding words, repetition of phrases, capitalizing Very Important Words). For that, it’s an enjoyable book to read.

In contrast, the last History Club movie we watched was also about the Holocaust, this time with teenagers who liked big band music and passively disobeyed the Nazis by playing it. The part that supposed to shock the viewer didn’t work for me. What did is the scene where one of the characters says something like, all right, I’ll go and join the retards and the cripples that’s where I belong.

That struck me.

Why?

Because if the film is set in the 1930’s-1940’s, I would bet that unless it was long before the concentration camps opened, there really weren’t all that many “cripples and retards” left. They were the test subjects for the first gas chambers, from different institutions, if I remember correctly. I don’t know how many there were, but the T-4 program was what allowed the death camps to exist in the first place. That character’s quote is a chilling statement, and one that doesn’t seem to be quoted anywhere that I can find. What stands out for me is the film has good music, seems a little lopsided somehow, and has this remarkable statement that’s been overlooked.

Anyway, there’s my movie reviews for the day.

Today (March 12) I took for my free day because I had to get off the couch and not fiddle about with the computer for awhile. Only probably was, I couldn’t think of anything spectacularly fun to do, that I don’t do anyway, so I sold some stuff at Rasputin’s and took my cart so I could go to the Milk Pail after. My trip at Rasputin’s was somewhat hurried as I got a call from BookBuyers, where I dropped off my resume only last Monday.

They want to talk to me about their database position! Yaaaay!

They seem like nice patient folks, but they now know, of course, that I don’t carry a pen with me and that I have difficulty remembering what date it is. In my defense, I was scrambling to look through my daily planner, where the dates I needed were covered up. Also I’ve been filling out government paperwork for the past two or three days, which always makes me want to jump up and down, which is of course why I was out in the first place.

Yes, yes, sitting on the couch filling out paperwork is all well and good, but there are times when I get tired of the radio saying “Folks, it’s a beautiful day! If you’re not outside, you should be!” They were actually saying that the other day. Annoying as I had to stay in.
At last, I told BookBuyers that I was out shopping and could I call them back. Then I dashed over to Whole Foods for lunch and then the Milk Pail. Naturally, I went to get stuff for fried cabbage and vegetable soup. Forgot most of the vegetable but did get some strange fruits as usual. I got a sweet lemon, sugar prunes, and more quince which I’m cooking currently to become a custard. I think they’re on the last run of the season there, as there was only one box. However, I had no luck finding the ugly fruit section, which is a shame as more ugly fruit is always welcome at home.

Then I went to Long’s, got pen and notebook, called BookBuyers, wrote down their information, and discussed ways to get there. As I didn’t have their location figured out yet, we eventually compromised so that I will meet them at their store that I am quite familiar with, rather than where I will actually be working. That’s a shame, because I do want to see the place, and I plan to, especially since I’ve mapped it out bow on VTA’s website. I haven’t been exactly where it is before, but at least I have a better idea of its location. That said, it was kind of them to compromise for our meeting.

Also found out that Whole Foods is now selling herbs and crops outside. I wanted the aspargus plant, as it was the one mentioned in Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal Vegetable Miracle, along with how to grow it, but it would have been squashed by the time I got home. Maybe I can ask the neighbors when they’re going shopping and pick it up then.
I’ve been thinking about the Academy of Sciences lately, since the neighbors are going. My last assesment went wrong because of the crowds and a confusing building. However, it was a very cool building, and I kept debating the small solar panels that formed canopies because I though they were cool. For one thing, they weren’t solid blue, and weren’t connected together, as our leader pointed out. But they were solar panels.

On the lighter side of things, the other day I went back over to the neighbors for dinner and brought suction cup figures and bead figures with me from the Klutz books. Everyone quieted down and soon we had the floor a royal mess with everthing spread out. Worked out very well. Around bedtime, with the scientist in the lead, we trooped to the bedrrom to attempt to suction cup other objects to the wall. From this, the scientist discovered that you can’t suction things that don’t have a good surface (stuffed animals) or put them on a textured wall successfully.

What we did discover, after exploring the room, was that the small suction cup was capable of holding much larger things than I thought possible. Naturally, I took pictures The double-sided suction cup held:

a small board Winnie the Pooh book

a larger flat ex-library book

a soccer ball (which appeared to be levitating)
a plastic sword, sheath and helmet (again, levitating. Extremely cool).

a small plastic red truck

one of the small headband miner’s lamps

a battery operating large flat plastic lit scrolling “fish tank”
the large round hinged trash can

ALL of these got pinned to the sliding glass doors. It was excellent. Of course, the scientist’s mother may have not been as pleased when I dashed out to explain that we had just fixed the trash can to the wall.

“The one with dirty diapers?”

“That’s the one,” I said, and dashed back in to see what could be suspended next.

The next time I came over I brought modeling clay but it turned out to be the strangest clay. It was springy and spongy, rather than stiff and greasy, if it was too old, so it must be made of different chemicals. I’m thinking about bringing over a play dough recipe next.

The Stanford career fair went quite well. Sorted through several internships and put them in piles according to which ones paid and which didn’t, the other night.

Then I went to my career center appointment this last Monday, pulled most of them out of the bag, and pinched off their paperclips by accident. Silly me. SHould’ve put them in manila envelopes. Anyway, made an appt for help with government paperwork, then throughly confused them down there, by canceling the next day.

I explained that I knew the appt was to help with the paperwork and I did need the help, but I couldn’t look for the jobs they wanted and do the paperwork at the same time. It was all under a time limit and with an hour appt, we’d hardly get through the instructions. It all worked out well, though, and to avoid a misunderstanding like it in future, I should call my career counselor there before I cancel. Makes sense.

So that was this week, roughly. I successfully completed the government paperwork last night for SSA, ahead of time in case there was a problem with it uploading. There wasn’t, and I celebrated as I’ve spent several days on the thing. ANd today I decided I wouldn’t spend time on the computer, yet here I am typing away.

Well, that’s probably a good thing. I have a story idea for what if the devil came to your house, a la folktales, but you were having a seizure. Now that’s been done in Running from the Devil  by            and the Book of Lost Things by                  , memior, and mythic fiction, respectively, but I was trying to think of how to do it differently. I have a picture in my head of this kid trying to translate at the doctor’s, for her mother, for example bulging eyes for dilation. Something to play with, anyway.

Lately, I’ve been watching Holocaust movies from Netflix. Not all together, but while we were traveling I found Look to the Sky, and while I was looking up reviews for that, I found The Island on Bird Street, and then

Well, today, as I’ve been battling computers in one shape or form for two weeks, I curse the computer gods. Among other setbacks, I am now going to a nonprofit career fair, to inquire about jobs I might do that do not to my knowledge actually exist, with absolutely no resumes whatsover, unless I’d like to take earlier drafts with punch holes.

Somehow, I don’t think that will do.

I have to fill out a master mock application for tomorrow’s job class, which means either I stay home and fill it out, or fill it out at 8 PM tonight, when I’m legally brain dead, and can’t knock on the neighbor’s door for assistance with the thing. Writing legibly in it is going to be a major issue.

It would be better if all the good things like career fairs and mock interviews had shaped themselves out a bit, but this week is apparently the season for them.

I’ve spent such a time setting up transportation, I’m not not going, just because I have no resumes. At the very least, I can talk to the employers.

In other news, the other day from the rain there was a beautiful rainbow that stretched across our backyard. Today after class it actually hailed! I stuck my hand out the door so I could feel it.

Of course, in Palo Alto, no hail…bright blue skies.

If I’ve pissed off the computer gods, the weather gods have been quite good to me. Everytime I need to travel, it stops raining just long enough for me to get there. Knock on wood for that, anyway.

It’s hard to believe there will be a drought, with the drains spouting water here in the mornings. I can sit on the porch and watch them shoot up like malfunctioning sprinklers.

It’s time to go see the neighbors and go to the career fair at Stanfor.d I plan to have dinner there first.

More about all this later.

I’ll finish the adventure at the science museum later, but I went over to the neighbors last night for dinner and that went well. Played multiple games of Sorry! before dinner, ate spaghetti for dinner, and then sorted and examined collected sea shells and one large naturally holey rock. We were supposed to be playing games again, but it quickly turned into sorting.
This was interesting because each mussel shell, of course, was thicker, thinner, differently shaped, with holes or without, reflective or not. We looked at many of them and discussed whether they could break and how to polish them.

“The water polishes them,” I said. “If you stepped on them, they would break.”

We then searched for glue to glue the shells into animals, but Elmer’s and glue sticks just won’t do for shells.

“We could melt them!”

I explained that melting would mean very high temperatures, not just on the stove or anywhere else, but so high that we could not easily do it. A volcano might, because a volcano makes even rocks run like water.
“What about very hot water?”

“No,” I said, it can’t get hot enough. But we tried it. We filled the bathroom sink with hot water and washed the thickest shell. But it doesn’t hurt.

What do you mean?

Well, it’s good to be curious.

“Now close the door so the hot won’t escape.”

But of course, hot air moves upward, so unless we had a very small box, the hot air will continue to cool down.

How come we can’t see it?

If you get it hot enough, like your Mom does on the stove with the spaghetti, then you can see the steam. The steam moves up, right?

But how do we keep it hot?

I suggested vinegar, since in the past, I have tried to show what vinegar does to bones and eggs. If shells are calcium, too, maybe vinegar will make the shell bend. The problem with the vinegar project before with the nieghbor kids was that it took too long (a week or two). I have never done this with shells so it will be interesting for me as well.
A hypothesis, I said, is the idea about the hot water and the shells.

So we let the water out of the sink, put the shell in a glass, and borrowed white vinegar from the kitchen. We quickly also got rice, apple cider, and wine vinegar as well, even though I don’t think it matters what kind of vinegar.

But how do we make it explode?

I knew of one thing, but wouldn’t say it, so we tried salt instead, as I thought salt might work, but it didn’t. At the insistence of the scientist, we also tried garlic powder, and would have tried paprika and many other spices, if I hadn’t said that they would make very pickles, but wouldn’t help with the shells.

Mints! We should put mints in!

Those wouldn’t help with the fizzing, I didn’t think (and besides I don’t want anything like that in there, because the reaction could be worse).
So I fetched my neighbor and explained to her about baking soda, that we were doing it in a sink, and that it would only ooze, and not actually explode.

The first combination was excellent, as it resulted in very large rising bubbles, which I haven’t actually seen the vinegar/baking soda reaction do before. After that, it had normal fizzing reactions. In the end, all the vinegar in the house was in the sink, and about the point everyone got ready for bed, around 8 or 9, the scientist was carrying around a slice of cucumber in a glass with garlic powder and vinegar.

I said we would make pickles next time.

All in all, it was a good hypothesis, I enjoyed myself and explaining science. A friend called while I was getting ready to leave, and everyone was getting ready for bed.

“Okay,” she said. “You need to get a teaching creditional. You could explain science to kids all day long. You’d be good at it.”

Probably for that kind of science, I would be. We discussed the Discovery Museum, and the Tech, places I should look for jobs. I’ve considered the position a friend of mine had in the past in science education. I researched it once, but I think you have to have a degree in science itself, which is a shame. I should look up the requirements again.
It was a fun night. I also had a variety of good science questions for next time: why steam rises, what reaction is it that actually changes the egg or bone, etc. Convinently, I found the answer to the bone question rapidly at home. The bone or egg is decalcified by the vinegar, causing the bone to bend and the egg to bounce.

Something I’ll have to show the scientist next time.

What I really should be doing right now is setting up transportation, but I haven’t made time to write in this blog in awhile, so I thought I would. I also need to make time today to start the garden, which I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time.

Before we left Quartzsite, we went to Celia’s Rainbow Garden, which was advertised quite a lot in town. It’s a very nice large park, made up almost entirely of rocks in different designs, dedicated to people who’ve died, with benches all over, and logs in trees of when different improvements have been put in. There’s a large fountain in front, that was turned off while we were there, and a horseshoe-shaped wall I admired, with tiles with children’s handprints on them. We saw several lizards and rabbits there, I suppose, because there is water for them. There were normal rocks, and white quartz, and even the colored fishbowl rocks that you buy in a store. There were complicated shapes of squaredancing, cowboy boots and flags, some more complex then others. It’s interesting to see the park itself, not only because of what’s in it, but because in our area, it wouldn’t exist, not with only rocks, and never such a large piece of land. It was nice.
On the way home from Quartzite, Mom and I stopped off at Landers and Bakersfield, to say hello to aunts (and one cousin). We went out to lunch at the seafood place at Landers and to the small used bookstore there, then on to Bakersfield, where of course, we sat about reading the Californian in the morning, like always.

Then we came home, and went about to several gardening stores to get potting soil, finally finding it for the best price. I wanted to make a little container garden with the long deep blue containers, so we set that up on the patio. And also the inside seed tray in the back room, so seeds can be planted early.

At my apartment, I called the neighbor to help with the laptop/printer problem. The large computer died while we were gone, so I was using the laptop. It had it’s nornal problem with printing Excel timesheets, which meant I had yanked every paper out of it so that it wouldn’t print the 995 page timesheet of 000’s that continued after my actual times ended. Then I couldn’t get it to cancel the document, which meant that nothing else could print. I finally called in reinforcements after I tried to fix it only to jam the paper, and discover that the 995-page document had canceled as I asked, was in fact, no where to be seen…but still wanted to print anyway. My neighbor fixed this problem, I fixed dinner for me, and all was well…until next morning, when i found out that apparently websites do not print, and everything from them must be copied and pasted. But, luckily, things like resumes now print!

The college now has, of all things, fresh fruits and vegetables on Wednesdays from something like 10-3, near the old library. I found a push cart that sold them. They also have specials, like bananas, cheese and a carton of milk for two dollars. What a novel idea! Vegetables closer to home! I bought 2 zuchinni and a pear for a dollar.

I took those home, went to Su Vianda, Mexican market, got a tomato, sweet potato, garlic, and radishes, and maybe a few others I forgot, and cooked it with the two zuchinnis and leftover fresh garbanzo beans(!) that I got near job club. I put the radish greens in too. That was dinner. It was excellent, though not done until 9:30 PM, and I wrote down what I put in it.

I’ve been doing nothing of interest the last week or so, as I’ve been working too hard. I’ve been concentrating on job searching. homework from the career center, trying to adjust resumes to employers. This requires a lot of cursing and extreme patience, as for the first week at least, my laptop decided that it would continue it’s new habit of taking perfectly good working internet, and switching automatically to wireless which didn’t work. I figured out the way to correct this problem was to restart the computer. This meant I was closing all documents, shutting down internet, restarting, finding 5-10 documents again, websites etc…every 15 minutes for about 8 hours a day.

The first and second days I behaved well doing this, as it’s been a new thing for awhile.
By the third I was agitated.

By the end of the week, I was royally pissed all the time.

But I did get all resumes and cover letters done and ready for the career fair…then didn’t need most of them, as most employers said I could apply online, which I knew to begin with in at least one case. Talking with employers went quite well, and I got several good tips about where to apply for jobs.

Now I have the resumes to do this with, which is good.

I went to office hours with my former internship professor, who was kind enough to not only recommend the Smithsonian, which I’ve been considering, but also to print out a textbook sized pile of job leads for many county, state and government positions that I would have never considered. That’s wonderful.

So last Thursday I came home for the weekend, and began figuring out which job classes I wanted to go to. For some unGodly reason, all job classes from several organizations decided to meet next week, all in different locations. I figured it out, then spent most of the day planning transportation from one to the other. And I browsed through the textbook-sized pile of job/internship leads, sorting those into ASAP and later piles. I think that will have to be later homework, as this week I probably have to work on resumes for all career fairs going on this coming week.

Dad told me how to fix the laptop internet problem, so hopefully, it will not start acting up again.

Yesterday, Saturday (2/28), I went with Vista Center to the new improved Academy of Sciences, a place I’ve been wanted to go very much since it opened, and since I saw thier great news program on the TV. I loved their old excellent building, especially the African Hall, with its dark tan ceilings and animal dioramas, and I believe I remember a weather exhibit too, and one comic strip exhibit of the Far Side. The old building was great. This new building had me very interested, however, as it’s supposed to have a grass roof, a rainforest, the aquarium, the tidepools, and a new, but respectfully reused African Hall, which is supposed to look similar to the old one.

I walked down and got there around 8 AM, before anyone else. I sat outside and read the paper, then went in when people began arriving. There was some confusion on my part as to whether I could go, because they have changed people, who don’t know me, as I don’t come on trips as often as I used to. I didn’t leave my name, naturally, and that caused confusion on their part. But we got it all straightened out.

Luckily, there were 3-4 old-timers there I knew, so we hung around and swapped tales of what we’d been doing, what we wanted to see (bugs, butterflies, African Hall, the rainforest, etc.), how amazing butterflies are for this or that quality, how fast this car or that one went, and how good an engine it had, and how our local handicapped transit works.

We arrived fairly quickly in San Francisco, piling out of the large bus, and stood about in groups to be sorted into smaller groups. I raised my hand as a person who could be a sighted guide, and went about seeing which group might need a hand. Luckily, I ended up where I wanted to be, with folks I knew, and we went in.

We were given a small, rather inadequate map (no restrooms, only one cafe marked, despite the other one and outside dining, no stairs or phones marked), and set off. The map needs to be a brochure. There were hordes of people, due to the new opening. I chose to help lead someone, because the rest of the group often traveled quite fast. It was difficult to keep track of whoever was in front of me, where the leader was, and keep hold of the person I was leading.

Right off, two people left our group (to be with another, it turned out).

In the past, often folks have broken up into pairs like this, if they were old enough.

At one point, I followed two people into a small gift shop, where I bought the video of the new science building quickly, because I knew we wouldn’t stay long, only to find that we were effectively lost, as the group leader soon returned from somewhere else. The problem, I found out, was that I follow whoever I know in front of me, regardless of where they happen to be going.

About our second or third trip around the lobby, first floor, which contained extremely few exhibits, we had:

1. studied the wall paintings that depicted prehistoric life, in great detail, attempting to narrate by turns what was happening

2.Narrated the quiz computers, which often had only two question quizzes and sometimes would not tell you if you had guessed correctly

3. Read the Galapagos island exhibit, which occupied a great deal of space, and if it had a map of the island, had it on a different poster board — it didn’t seem to discuss finches, their importance to the Origin of the Species, the Beagle, Charles Darwin, or much at all. Of course I wasn’t reading the exhibit cards much, so maybe I’m mistaken. But the boards didn’t seem to have much on them.

We got there at 11:00 AM. From 12-1 PM, we found a bench and rested, as everyone’s feet hurt. The largest room seemed to be the cafeteria. We couldn’t find African Hall, or anything else. There were too many people. There was very little that could be manipulated by blind people, as might be expected in a museum, but something appeared to be very wrong with the exhibits I saw in the main lobby too. They didn’t explain much. I went over myself to explore the ladybug, face variation, and beetle exhibits, and to look at the dog skulls. The dog skull exhibit was disappointing, because although it labeled which skull was which, and although it was interesting for me to note the thick muscle crests at the back of the skulls were nonexistant on some dogs, highly developed on others, or at the sculpted caved-in look of two skulls with high horn-like ridges on the forehead — there was absolutely nothing to explain this. No chart of the parts of the skull that I noticed, such as comparing the crests where the jaw muscles run and why they would be different in different dogs, or how this compared with the crests in human skulls. Nothing.

The ladybug exhibit which contained 94 X 94 ladybugs, according to one count by one of Vista volunteers, was amazing considering the amount, and explained that each ladybug was different and had different spots — due to the preservation or something, the spots were difficult to see. The exhibit didn’t even explain the simple fact, something I know the older museum had, that most male ladybugs don’t have spots. It did not explain what they ate in the wild. It just had ladybugs.
The human variation (faces) exhibit had several faces pasted together (eyes from one person, nose from another, etc.). Because there was little explanation I could find, it could simply be assumed that these were pasted pictures such as you might morph at home — not that these were different races of people, with different skull types, different bodies according to where they lived (skin color, height, tall or fat, according to weather), or any other anthropological fact. Now keeping in mind that I browsed all exhibits extremely quickly due to the people there, and the group, where was this essential information? Why are these people different? should be the first question a serious exhibitor asks. If I did not know why, how should it be explained? Differently then that, let me tell you.

More about this trip later.