Sunday, February 18, 2007

Prettiness, Math Problems, and a Cautionary Tale

Below is the State Pond, my favorite fishing spot. Yesterday, after our 1" blizzard, Lori and I headed out to our favorite spots to see what they looked like in the snow.

We were laughing because yesterday was the day before our one year anniversary of arriving here, and we finally got the last of our stuff out of storage.

We've been busy. :-)

We were so happy about actually living with all our stuff again that we rewarded ourselves with our favorite pastime, driving around and listen to the radio and talking aimlessly. We drove out to the State Pond to see how it looked in the winter, and it was pretty nifty. The wind was blowing hard, and the pines were swaying.

They actually whispered, like the cliche always says. I think they were whispering something like "Destroy WWET with your secret insidious machiavellian plot to have intelligent conversations with people who aren't bitter"...but I can't be sure. I wish the pines would speak up.



We hiked around to the spillway side of the pond, and the ice looked thin there, so I asked Kwachie if she would mind if I threw a heavy branch out onto it to see how thick it was, since I didn't want to mess up her picture-taking. She thought that might be interesting too, and I threw a limb out onto the ice. Not only did the ice not break, but the stick skittered out a long way without disturbing the ice one whit. Above is a picture of the actual stick, not a photoshopped replica or anything.

This, kids, is science in the real world. If we extrapolate the weight of the stick, the force of the throw, the acceleration due to gravity, and the density of the ice under standard temperature and pressure, we should be able to determine why we became biologists and not physicists.

After not attempting this math problem, we walked up the little road in the picture above that we used to walk up in the summertime, but now it has a sign that says "road closed", no doubt to protect those of us who aren't smart enough to stay home in a blizzard.

On the way home we went past the Hay House, so named because the story goes that this beautiful old house on a hill was built by a father as a wedding present for his daughter. When she refused to live in it because it was too far from town, he used it as a hay barn. It's still a beautiful house, but the windows are all knocked out and you can see the hay rolls inside. The barn has collapsed in that special way that barns collapsed, where they just get tired of standing and gently lower themselves to the ground...but on the same footprint they had while standing. It ends up looking like it was squashed by an enormous foot.

Similar to the way that the Evil Overlord Kwachie has metaphorically squashed WWET with her Evil Footprint of Conversational Doom. As her Potted Plant, I can only shudder in impotent dismay, desperately photosynthesizing for all I'm worth, at this Creepy Conspiracy.

(That last part was so the trolls have something to shriek about later. "I knew it! It was all part of their evil scheme! See? See? See how bad they are?")

You're welcome, Trolls. :-)

Ev

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Re branch-on-pond math problems:

The angle of the dangle and the drop of the drip is directly related to the heat of the meat.

Just so you know ...