The Sky is Falling Complaint T…
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My phone line isn't working right now. At least I have a lifeline back up number and also home internet. That way I can get the help to restore services.
...yeah I remember those days. Pretty much the same, rarely locked the doors unless the family went somewhere together. We played out front in the street or in the alleyway in back, and wandered or rode our bikes around the neighbourhood with friends as long as we were back before dark.
One of the nteresting things was being allowed to pick up a pack or two of cigarettes for mum at the grocery store down the street with a note from her.. That would never ever happen today.
As to science toys....
I had three sets, A chemistry set, Geology set, and a Microscope set as well as a refractor telescope (I was a big science geek as a kid and still am)
One kit I didn't have was the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab that also incluided the following:
A sealed cloud chamber with Polonium (²¹⁰Po) Polonium is highly toxic and dangerous if ingested or inhaled.
Three low level radiation sources
Four jars containing natural uranium ore samples (with a warning not to break the seals)
It was on the market for only two years (1950 & 1951) being discontinued due to low sales rather than any danger the contents above may have presented.
Ah yes, at some point we went from letting children play with explosives, radioactive material, and poison to saying they can't eat cookie dough because it's dangerous.
I got this poncho as an early birthday gift from my aunt.
My grandfather on my mom's side was chemist, and mom talks about how he used to bring balls of mercury home for her and her sister to play with.
They lived in BFE Wisconsin at the time, and she used to walk a long way to 4-year-old kindergarten (because they had two years back then I guess?) on her own, no matter the weather. And once when she had -- measles, I think? Or mumps -- the teacher just sent her home like it was no big (she was a few years older by then) and Grandma turned around in the middle of the day and there she was. I know for sure my grandparents didn't lock their doors at all well into the 80's, because I remember Mom trying to convince them that it wasn't safe anymore.
I wasn't quite a feral child like she and her friends were; we had to tell adults when we were going somewhere, and always be in a group. But you just never worried when you were outside; if somebody got hurt, you (or a friend) just knocked on the nearest door and someone came out dealt with it.
And then a girl was kidnapped from a gas station in our town, and two months later Jacob Wetterling disappeared about an hour north of us, that was definitely the end of that.
I did have a Gilbert chemistry set, but I didn't have the Gilbert Radioactivity set, but for a year or so, I used my own money to send $5 a month to a company that I found in comic book advertisements (or possibly the 400 page Edmund Scientific Catalog), that would send monthly science experiment kits. With the kits I started out doing the standard compass & electricity/magnetism experiments, then they sent some electronic parts (an AC power transformer, a rectifier tube, and various capacitors and resistors), a sturdy cardboard base with a bakelite mounting top into which I first built a one-tube rectifier, and later a three-tube amplifier, the electronic kits included a soldering iron (I still have it) and taught me how to solder properly. Those kits weren't quickie breadboard plug-n-play toys, you had to do real mounting, wire cutting and bending, and soldering. Another kit provided materials to make a carbon granules microphone, then later experiments turned my box into a radio receiver or a transmitter. Later kits converted it into an optical voice transmitter & receiver using the amplifier, the microphone, and the lenses from the optics kit, and a photo-resistor to detect the optical modulation.
And the photography kit was how I learned how to develop chemical films & photographs, and used the optics kit light & lenses kit to build an enlarger. And one month's kit was devoted to radioactivity. I received a bag of Uranium ore about the size of a pack of cigarettes, and the kit included parts to make a cloud chamber. The photography kit parts were used to develop X-Ray photos after using the Uranium bag emitting alpha, beta, and a few gamma particles to expose photo film or paper. They also sent a tiny pin in a cork. The head of the pin was covered with Radium paint, like on old clock faces. You'd stick the cork with the radium into the cloud chamber and watch the streams of alpha particles from it.
Those kits also fanned my interest in making gun powder for blowing up cow manure plops, and there was great fun in floating sodium metal on little rafts in a sealable glass jar of water and tossing it. The sodium broke apart the water molecules and grabbed the Oxygen and released the Hydrogen from the water, and the heat eventually ignited the Hydrogen, and BOOM! Great fun, until mom made me pick up the glass pieces out of the yard.
Via those science kits I learned that natural gas(methane) is slightly lighter than air, so I began removing the burner head from our outdoor natural gas BBQ-grill and filling flimsy plastic laundry bags (like those that covered a suit when it came back from the dry-cleaners), with methane, tying a lit match to the bottom, and sending it into the night sky. Wheee... fireball at 60 feet up.
Neighbor kids would come to watch and learn. Ah, those were the good ol' days.
Toda is payday! They weren't in this morning but they came before I clocked out of work. I'm now waiting for my ride to the bank.
edit toda is slang for today or it could be a typo. You decide which?
Complaint: I just had to explain to someone in charge of one of my son's supports that to get a monthly amount from a yearly budget, you have to divide the budget amount by 12. And no, if you divide it by 52-weeks-in-a-year and multiply that by 4-weeks-in-a-month, it won't be the same, because there aren't exactly four weeks in a month. I would mind less if, after I explained that, she went "oh, duh, you're right, long day, sorry" -- we all have moments like that. But no, she actually argued with me that the end result was the same by both methods until I did the full calculation out both ways and sent it back to her.
And for this I am being charged a monthly service fee. I ought to get a refund every time I have to do their jobs for them (which is often).
Really, though, how is this not basic common sense? Seven days in a week, times four, is 28. And there are how many days in most months?
...it's a good thing you can't still order those science kits by mail...
@ SilverGirl Well, at least you didn't have to explain to a clerk in the driving licensing bureau that there actually is a US State named "New Mexico". (*slaps forehead*) (not from me, just a story I read on the Internet, so it must be true)
I thought some stories on the internet are fictional but they forgot to say that.
...indeed, fun times, like when I got into Estes model rockets.
...I always felt I should get a couple day's rebate on rent and bills for February being such a short month..
I just dreamt that I was debating on asking the question to my boyfriend.
I'm hungry but my pancakes are cold.
I'm hungry, but my pancakes are non-existent.
That would be OK if you were virtually hungry.
Non-complaint: Monthly budget is still in the black by $9.73 and only two more days before next SS deposit. Yay!
Complaint: My Amazon shopping cart is waiting in the wings, ready to go on stage and deplete next month's savings.
So many needful things.
Complaint: I bought a (cheap) security camera a week or so ago, mentioned in an earlier post. Unfortunately the Cloud service sign-up proceedure was sketchy & clumsy, and I ended up boogering the on-line Cloud service subscription and it was cancelled.
That's OK, I really didn't want them having my CC# anyway. And it saves me $5/month.
Non-complaint: Despite the on-line account and Cloud service being terminated, the camera still records to its internal memory card, and communicates with my Android phone using Bluetooth and lets me view and download videos directly from the camera without going through the Cloud. I don't really need the Cloud service, and that gives me time to find possibly another cloud service that has a less sketchy feeling & reputation. However, if someone reaches up and unscrews my cheap camera from the light socket then I've lost the camera and its images of the perpetrator that I hadn't had time to download yet. Hmmm...
This is my first experience with a non-professional security system. Learning curve. All in all though, I am pleased with the images it produces and it even follows the postman as he drops off packages on my porch.
Is it possible that there's nothing new in the store since Saturday? I still see the Swords of Legend at the top and the others that were already there. Just wondering. Not buy anything today, anyhow.
Possible and true.
Last night I dreamt I was in a simulation of sorts that I could not find a way out.
well, dreams are basically your brain's own personal holodeck... just with a lot less control over the program, generally speaking.
true. I dreamt I couldn't read which is only true in my dreams.
Today is my birthday!
Happy birthday.
Yet another non-fatal trip around the Sun.
That deserves some celebratory music:
The overture from Ruslan and Ludmila: by M. Glinka
YAY!!!
Most people can't read in their dreams. Apparently, the part of your brain that processes language is less active when you sleep.
I can read in my dreams, it's just that the text changes while I'm reading it.
So I see words, but they don't make any sense.
Happy Birthday, Sfariah D!
Really? Huh. No difference between wake-reading and sleep-reading for me, and sometimes I wake with completely clear memories of what I was reading. One more way I'm weird, I guess.
Hippo birdie two ewe!
Happy Birthday, Sfariah D!
Happy Birthday, Sfariah!