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| Yesterday in class we went over a worksheet on Snell's Law. I sent kids up to the board present solutions and sat in their vacated seats. Through a thick end-of-day brain-fuzz I suddenly noticed the high, hollow plunk of a pencil dropping. Over. And over. And over again.
I looked up to see the kid next to me hurridley retrieving his Dixon Ticonderoga from the ground. His sheepish expression turned anxious as he caught my eye mid-retrieval. He froze, terrified. "What the..." I started, about to slam down my own pencil, which I had been twirling at ~60 rpm....wait.
I stopped my pencil mid-twirl and looked at it. Pause. I looked at the kid next to me, whose expression was now anxiously focused. The sound of his pencil dropping yet again cut through the silence in my head as I took in the room and noticed pens and pencils dropping from fumbling fingers at every table. The kid at the board turned around, his earnest explanation of Snell's Law trailing as off as a flood of amused merriment, directed at me, erupted from the far corner table. Ah. I see.
I assembled and my Angriest Teacher Look. "Just pay attention to the kid at the front of the room I'll teach interested parties how to pencil-twirl after school on Monday. Now SHOOSH! HUSH! QUIET!" The laughing turned to cheering before it died down.
The remainder of the kid's excellent retelling of Snell's Law was received with relative, if gleeful, silence.
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| "I'm team leader!"
"No, I'm team leader!"
"Rock paper scissors!"
"No, I'm really bad at that!"
<pause>
"How can you be bad at rock paper scissors?"
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| I'm reading the VA Cyber Security Awareness Course Manual that the Dinosaur brought home. On email security, the manual advises, "be cautious when opening email from someone you don't know."
"How do you open email cautiously?" I question, irritated, "you either open it or you don't."
The Dinosaur leans in to the table and surreptitiously looks to his left before sweeping to the right. "You could look around before you open it."
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| The Dinosaur is the only person I know who can drunk-call his grandmother.
The story goes like this:
The Dinosaur is applying to residencies in Emergency Medicine. His attendings at UC Davis, one of his top choices, were favorably impressed by his performance during the month-long rotation he did there. The program director promised to collect comments from all of the people who had worked with the Dinosaur and write a positive letter of recommendation for his general application. True to his word, the letter was uploaded to the central application center but a week later, while we were climbing in Yosemite.
"We should get him something to thank him," the Dinosaur and I agreed. "Maybe a bottle of wine," the Dinosaur mused. He picked out a bottle from a local winery in Yosemite with a beautiful Half Dome label. We wrapped the bottle snugly in a foam sleeping pad, stuffed the ends with clothing, and centered it in a bomb-proof big-wall haul bag. Nothing was getting to that bottle of wine, we agreed, not even the likes of United Airlines ORD baggage handlers.
I checked in for my own flight home the next morning with minimal trouble. 30 minutes later, while I was waiting at the gate, the Dinosaur called. "I hate United," he said, by way of greeting, "They won't let me check the wine without a closed Styrofoam enclosure. So I'm in the bathroom," the Dinosaur continued, "drinking the bottle of wine." Over my yelp of laughter and subsequent giggling, I heard my boarding announcement and hung up to get on the plane.
15 minutes later, a text message: "I drank the whole bottle. I'm so drunk."
When we reunited at the airport in New York some 8 hours later, the Dinosaur appeared to be completely sober and calm in spite of the nearly visible wino fumes emanating from every pore. We put the episode behind us.
Over dinner tonight, out of the blue, he revealed, "I called Nanny while I was drinking that bottle of wine."
And what his doting grandmother have to say about her eldest grandson drinking an entire bottle of white wine in an airport bathroom?
"She said, 'Oh, garsh!'" he reported.
This was probably the same exasperated 'Oh, garsh!' that applies to things like me not wanting to the take the last enticing sliver of pumpkin pie from the pie plate.
Thus, the Dinosaur is the only person I know who can drunk call his grandmother.
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| Today the kids were drawing hypothetical diagrams on indivdual whiteboards, guessing at the workings of a black box which spews forth different colors of water from a hidden network of tubes when clear water is poured into various funnels.
"Maybe she used dye!"
"Dye? What do you mean, dye?"
"Like, food dye."
Here a kid we'll call Floppy Freshman made his contribution. Punctuating his statement with a single gleeful stabbing motion into the ribs of his unblinking seatmate, he announced slowly, "...Like people die..." Floppy Freshman grinned a diabolical grin celebrating his clever pun. His seatmate's eyes consulted the cieling before he took up the whiteboard marker to amend their diagram. | | |
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