make it do or do without

[lauradi7dw]

After my grandmother died (February of 1995, I think), we took in a bunch of her furniture, and my parents added my childhood homework desk (a lot like this one, but with glass fronts for the bookcase part http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Secretarydeskfront20050410.jpg) to the moving van, for Florence. The shelves still had a bunch of my books, and the cubbyholes were all full of stuff, including a protractor. I used it yesterday, while measuring angles of refraction and reflection (oddly enough, the lab experiments are out of synch with the lecture. In the regular class we're working on Faraday's law, which doesn't have much to do with light rays changing angle when hitting a new medium). The deal was that one shone a laser light (being careful not to look directly at it) through a lucite cube and later through a prism, drawing the lines that came out, and measuring their angles. One can free-associate. When connecting all the points of in-and-outness, two of us thought of "Connect the dots, la la la, connect the dots" from Pee Wee's playhouse, and when we started on the prism "Dark Side of the Moon" seemed more appropriate. At any rate, I was pleased to be using a cheap plastic school supply that I bought more than 35 years ago.
Due to occasional bouts of diligence (this isn't one of them, although I am about to finish typing up the lab report), I had fallen behind on my internet reading, but I went back through this morning and caught up on the Dress a Day site. This entry seems to fit well with the joys of using an old tool (the bit about using boxes in her sewing room that her grandmother-in-law used for the same purposes).
http://www.dressaday.com/2008/07/disorganization-is-still-organization.html
Let the mouse hover over the photos for secret messages.