Another couple weeks have drifted by. My life is relatively uneventful right now. Thinking back over what has happened, I'm having problems coming up with anything notable.
This last Friday, I got to give a presentation to a visiting class of middle school students. My actual presentation ended up being kind of average. We talked about gravity and falling objects, and did the demo where you shoot a ball horizontally and drop a ball at the same time, and you watch them fall at the same rate. We did this from the second floor of the building, which ends up being a drop of about 25 feet.
Everything else on campus is pretty standard. My classes just got through their midterms. They did well enough overall. I got to meet the teachers for the third grade curriculum project. They're extremely organized, which is helpful for us because it means we have to do much less work trying to figure out what they need and what they think would work. I've already recorded a video for them (on lattice multiplication), and early next week I'm going to have to go through and edit it. It shouldn't take too long.
One of the benefits of having a random impulse to cook up a rib roast is eating a rib roast. That happened to me today. I'm not exactly sure why, but I woke up this morning with the desire to make a roast of some sort. One thing led to another, and I suddenly find myself hanging out with a few friends, enjoying the results of my spontaneity. I gave it a rosemary garlic salt rub, but I didn't really pick up much of the rosemary flavor. I tried rubbing the rosemary with the salt to pull out the essential oils, but either I didn't do a good job, or maybe I should have chopped the rosemary first. It was seasoned well enough, so that was good. I also made a potato gratin, which was good but nothing exciting.
As I'm typing this, I'm watching "The Incredible Dr. Pol" and they are de-horning goats. It's reminding me of "Dirty Jobs" because they aren't shying away from what it is. (Skip the rest of this paragraph if the idea of de-horning goats already makes you uncomfortable.) The horns are coming in poorly because of a botched procedure when the goats were kids. I guess this is done in order to keep them from being too dangerous when they butt things as adults. They're using a rope saw to cut off the horns, and then they need to burn off the remaining horn tissue (so that it won't keep growing back). And now he's helping a cow give birth by reaching all the way in to pull out the calf. I'm going to try to watch a few more episodes of this. It's strangely fascinating.
