Happy Summer! Well, to those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, at least. ‘Twas a lovely day today – an Open Windows Day, as I’m sure Leo would call them if he could speak.

So, back to B-WISER. I spent Wednesday night going around the dorms helping Becky and Charlene as they checked on the state of the girl’s straw bridges. That was pretty interesting in itself. The ideas that they came up with – plus the variance in quality/progress throughout the camp. We got back to our dorm about the time the girls were supposed to be in bed.

Thursday was Current Electricity Day. “One of these days I’m gonna run away and join the circuits,” I always say. I don’t understand why boys are encouraged to build electronics and girls are not – the girls always love building circuits and playing with lights and motors. Some of them even asked where they could get the various pieces parts to play with at home. (RadioShack is the answer. If you’ve got questions, they’ve got answers. The answers are usually “I don’t know,” and “I’ll have to ask my supervisor” whenever I ask questions, but there ya go…)

That evening was the bridge contest. I helped out a little in the Check In process, but then headed off to KMart with Carolyn while Becky and Charlene judged design. This is when I bought my Martha Stewart towels. (She did a very good job in making those towels, BTW. For $4, I got a nice fluffy towel that actually wraps around me!) I was back in time for the bridge testing. Turns out the bridge I picked to be the strongest actually was. It even beat the B-WISER record. (It held 1350 grams – not bad for a bridge made of straw and pins). It also won overall, since it had a long span and was pretty tall compared to the other bridges. (Just now realized that I didn’t take any pictures of the bridges. Bad journaler! No cookie!)

Denise (who was totaling up the points) and I headed off to join Carolyn, Joyce, Dee, and Dennis at TJ’s, another bar in Wooster. When we arrived, Carolyn paid for Denise’s drink, to congratulate her on taking up the role of co-assistant for the camp next year. I had an Amaretto Sour (a better one than the one from the Jaol) and water – which Dee picked up. The six of us talked and laughed for another hour or so before returning to the dorms and bed. Only one more day of the camp!

Friday is the day that Dee and I always end with static electricity. Sure, static usually goes before current electricity, but the van de Graaf is a wonderful way to end the week. Alas, the one that we borrowed from the physics department of Wooster didn’t work all that great. The little one that Dee brought (brand new – thanks to a grant from the Tipp City Rotary Club) worked just fine.

Me and my fluffy hair. I’d always start the activity off so that the girls would be afraid to touch the van de Graaf.

Dee does her Phyllis Diller imitation.

One girl does her Dandelion imitation.

After the last class, Dee and I rushed to finish packing (we’d done most of the classroom stuff the day before) and then headed for McGaw Chapel where the final recognition ceremony was. We teachers began the program by embarrassing ourselves with the B-WISER Camp Song (sung to the tune of “YMCA”.)

I had one of the girls take our picture as we sang. She got all of us but Sue. From left to right: Sue (not in photo), Wanda, Bill (hiding), Joyce, Dennis, Carolyn, me, Lois, Betty…

…Denise, Charlene, Becky, Ann, and Dee. I think those pink shirts really screwed up my white balance on those shots… (Notice that Bill and Dennis were spared.)

After all the girls got their certificates (and the counselors even honored us teachers with certificates – I got the Big Kid award), it was time to go out to our last supper. I do have a photo with Sue here:

Carolyn, Joyce, Lois, and Sue. Sue will be the other co-director of the camp next year.

After supper, I meandered back to the room with Carolyn and we packed up our plants (we got free kalanchoe plants that were leftover from the Alumni weekend. I claimed a cute little red one. Carolyn took a red one, a yellow one, and a pink one. She’s got a gorgeous garden at her place (no grass, just flowers) and they’ll be right at home. I apologized to mine cuz it’s gonna die. Let’s be honest with ourselves) and hugged and drove off back home.

Bleh – it is warm in the house. Come on, breeze! Let’s let these Open Windows mean something!

This is a long and image laden post which ought to cover the rest of my B-WISER week. So I’ve decided to put it all under an LJ cut. Perhaps someday I’ll put together a webpage of B-WISER trips. This could well be a good start to it.

It all began as it usually does with us teachers and counselors arriving the day before the girls. Dinner at the Barn Restaurant – all you can eat buffet and heavenly desserts. It’s all thanks to Lois that we eat there every year. At the farm where the Barn is, there is a string of shops. The one we all visit (and spend lots of money at) is the toy store. I bought some Frigits, a couple of rockets, a pull-back racing rat for Leo, and a few other toys.

Sunday’s the day when the girls arrive. It’s usually the day when we teachers get our rooms ready, but since we met at Severance (the Chemistry building) when we checked in the day before, Dee and I were able to set up our room the day of our arrival. So, that morning, Carolyn, Becky, and I did that long two hour walk that I’d talked about in a previous post. The afternoon was time for goofing off. At quarter til 5, everyone gathered at the Douglass Lounge and the girls all did their skits that they’d been working on since 4:15 and then we introduced all the teachers. And then it was supper time!

Monday was our first day of classes and it was rather uneventful. The evening activity was Dr. Helen Free. And eventually it was time for bed. Ah, Monday night… A night that shall rattle along in my memory for a good long time.

We had a major storm that night. Shake the rafters-style storm. There was even the flash/boom of a nearby hit. But that wasn’t anything to write home about. The power must have gone out, but I didn’t really notice it. I think I actually fell asleep as the storm died away around 2am. At 3:30am, however, the most incredible noise started up and woke me. It was loud – a rumbling that was phenomenal. I figured it was the trash man and looked out sans glasses. I saw what I figured was a shape in front of the trash dumpster and told Carolyn it was the trash guys. Well, many minutes passed and the noise continued. So I got up again and this time put on my glasses. No, that wasn’t a shape, that was just the driveway I saw. Then it finally dawned on me – the fan wasn’t going anymore. But the hallway lights were on. Ah! A generator. The Generator from Hell, in fact. Carolyn and I had to shout to hear each other. And what was worse, the beds vibrated from the sound. I must have dozed off despite the loud rumbling, but the vibrations made poor Carolyn ill.

A little before 6am (I was awake again and had been for awhile) I noticed the fan was running again. However, the generator was still going. Thankfully, it ended a bit after 6 (then started again before finally turning off for good). Bleh – a very unpleasant night. (Worse for Carolyn, poor dear.) When we asked the others at our end of the hall, turns out no one else heard the Generator from Hell. Ah, guess it’s under our room. Bleh!

Tuesday was Work and Power day for Dee and I. We had the girls play with balloon cars, Alka Seltzer Canons (using film canisters), and running up the stairs to calculate their work and power. Tuesday evening was the teacher’s first real night off. Joyce, Dee, Carolyn and I went off to see Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Yes, I’d seen it already with judiang, but I liked it enough to see it again. At one point in the flick, Joyce and Dee were startled by something on the screen, and that managed to wake Carolyn up so that she could see the rest of the film.

After the movie, Joyce called Bill and Dennis, the token men of the camp, and told them we were heading for The Olde Jaol. All of the outdoor tables were taken by the time we arrived, so we sat indoors. I had an Amaretto Sour (no surprise there) and later a strawberry smoothie (no alcohol) and munched on the appetizers that were going around the table. We talked and laughed and listened to Carolyn’s stories and laughed even more. Bill has yet to learn his lesson – Carolyn more or less treats him as a straight man and usually gets some zingers in at his expense.

Tuesday night was, thankfully, uneventful, storm-wise. And Wednesday is usually one of my favorites. Flight day! We had the girls inside playing with flight toys and outside playing with water rockets and stomp rockets. And now I can finally put in some photos.

A girl, midair, jumping on a Stomp Rocket.

A water rocket going off.

We do Flight Day on Wednesdays, because the evening program is Gary Broadbent, America’s number one boomeranger. He’s a great motivational speaker and he loves science. He’s come to B-WISER for several years now and I never tire of seeing him. The poor guy is a bit OCD (OK, so maybe “a bit” it a bit too mild a description) and has the world’s largest boomerang collection. His house is even in the shape of a boomerang. He was doing trick catches and while he tried to do the mouth catch, it took 42 tries before he got it. (See, I told you “a bit” was too mild.) He usually gets it in 2 tries. (I think he was distracted – when he was talking about his oldest daughter, who suffers from Cystic Fibrosis, he said he’d taken her to the children’s hospital the day before and she was down to 50% lung capacity. This is a man who lives for his kids first and boomerangs second.) Still, he kept the girls entertained for two hours, showing off his boomerangs (no, they’re not all V-shaped sticks) and throwing many of them and catching them.

Gary Broadbent and the Colossal Comeback. This is a boomerang with a 4-foot diameter. He threw it and caught it a couple of times that night.

Some of his cool boomerang designs. A bat, a snake, and even Tigger!

A toucan!

Boomwatch:2004. Derek (the young man who was our go-fer this year), Carolyn, Joyce, Lois, and Bill.

Lois’s birthday cake. Her 80th birthday was the day before, but we had the cake on Wednesday night. And since there are so many girls, we had two cakes…

The Periodic Table Cake. My kind of cake! (Actually, the first cake was white cake, and I had some of it. The second cake was chocolate, but I passed on that.)

I think I’ll tackle Thursday and Friday tomorrow night. I pretty much wore myself out just writing about the start of the week. Heh!

I’m home, I’m watching the new episode of Monk, and I’m getting caught up on LJ. Leo’s next to me on the end table. He was happy to have me back. I was happy to be back. 🙂

I’ll update my journal when I finally get caught up. Got some photos of some hair raising experiences (or maybe they’re just of ladies on the van de Graaf.)

This is just a quick entry to say that the week is nearly over (duh!) and I’ll be coming home tomorrow – woohoo! I have had a blast this week (and have been busy, which is why I’ve barely updated the journal). I’ll have many pictures to post this weekend – the periodic table birthday cake that we got for Lois’s 80th birthday being the geekiest of the lot. But also some shots of girls shooting off water rockets and maybe some pictures of folks on the van de Graaf (if it works out fine tomorrow).

This year will be Betty & Lois’s last year as assistant director and director of this camp. Next year, Denise (see the picture from my last post) and Susan will be co-directors. Cool! So I guess I’ll have to come back next year to support our new directors. 🙂

Oh, while Carolyn (I had to go back and edit my earlier entries to spell her name right), Joyce, and I were at K-Mart tonight, I bought some nice purple & green towels for the bathroom. Bye bye old blue tatty towels! Hello new cheap ass towels! (Still, Martha Stewart made these towels, so I’m sure they’re good.)

Ah, another wonderful day at B-WISER. Dee and I had the girls doing measurement – volume and density. They had fun and enjoyed the Chinese yo-yos that we gave them as toys. One girl (after receiving her toy at the end of class) said that physics was her favorite with robotics second. 🙂 We know how to bribe the girls! The evening session had Dr Helen Free, patent holder and mother of 9 children, who talked with the girls about Diabetes. She worked on the 10-reaction reagent strips that are now very commonly used in hospitals and helped in the design of the portable glucose meters that diabetics use. She and her husband (who worked in the same field) were inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame.

I have some more photos to share. This time I’ve included some of the crazy ladies that I work with. (And I mean that in a good way.)

Carolyn’s bed in Douglass.

My bed in Douglass. As you can see, this is a damn site bigger than the prison cell we had Saturday night.

Some of my crazy lady co-workers. Charlene’s in the back. Joyce and Carolyn (my roomie) in the front.

Some other crazy lady co-workers. Denise and Becky.

Dee, my partner in physics helping out one of the B-WISER girls (edited out of the shot due to privacy reasons).

As you saw from the pictures (if you clicked on the LJ cut) I have some zany co-workers. That’s why I have so much fun at this camp. Not only do I get to teach physics, but I get to work with some really cool female teachers. (We’ve got two male teachers on staff and they’re pretty cool too.)

Tomorrow for Dee and I is Work, Power, and Energy!

Yay! I brought along some cat-5 cable along with my laptop just in case the LAN ports were operative in the dorn rooms. They are! Yay! (Thanks to my roomie, I have a cable long enough to reach my bed. Mine was only 10ft long, hers is more like 20ft. And I had forgotten to mention this originally, but when she had me read it to her, she bitched about it, so I’m including it now.)

So I can do occassional updates this week. (In order to wear the kids out, we’ve got ’em busy most of the day. That tends to wear us teachers out too.)

To get an idea of the prison cell that they put us in the first night (last night) I took a couple of pictures.

My bed.

Carolyn’s bed.

We’re back in our proper dorm now (Douglass) and in our proper room, which is much bigger (but still not air conditioned). There’s currently a big thunderstorm going on outside and we’ve got a wonderfully cool breeze, however. So that’s nice.

The girls arrived today and they seem like a good bunch of girls. (The collective noun for a group of girls I’ve always figured was “giggle.” So we’ve got a good giggle of girls this year.) Tomorrow we actually have our first classes with them.

Walked for 2 hours solid this morning with my roomie, Carolyn, and another teacher, Becky. And you know what’s so odd about Wooster? It’s all uphill! It’s amazing – we started our walk going uphill, and we finished going uphill. I’ve always suspected that MC Escher had a hand in the design of this city.

I will probably add more stuff later – I’m ready to read some and then hit the sack. Busy day tomorrow!

The Buckeye Women In Science, Engineering and Research (B-WISER) Institute is an organization of women (and a couple of men for good measure) who try to encourage young women into the physical sciences. Despite this being the 21st century, girls still aren’t being encouraged into chemistry, physics, geology, etc. as much as the boys. So Dr. Lois Cook, professor emeritus last of Wright State University (my alma mater – and my dad’s) and Betty Obara (my old junior high science teacher) started a camp for 7th grade girls several years ago, and it’s still going strong. Lois graduated from the College of Wooster many (many) years ago and was welcomed back to the campus with her science camp. Dr. Ted Williams, retired chemistry chair, from Wooster, is the third go-getter who got this camp off the ground. And me? Well, I teach physics there with my co-teacher, Dee Leis (an elementary science teacher from Tipp City, OH).

When the camp was in its second year (or maybe third? but I think second) my sister and I were contacted about being counselors in the camp. I was a freshman in college and Amy a freshman in high school, and we both said yes. My sister was able to continue as a counselor throughout her HS career, but I kept having conflicts in the summer. No matter, after I became a physics teacher, I came back. This time as a teacher.

The camp is loads of fun – for the teachers and the girls. We all have at least one other co-teacher in our respective subjects (chemistry, physics, earth science, computers, research, and engineering) and this year, we’ll have a robotics unit too! (The engineering bit is part of the research bit and the girls work on projects at night – building straw bridges.) The food is good, the campus is gorgeous, the dorms that we’re stuck in SUCK, but hey – it’s only a week. I love my coworkers (and my roommate is completely mad – and thus wonderful) and enjoy the week teaching science.

Tomorrow morning I’ll pack up the car (it’s already got the science equipment packed in it) and head oop north (and east) to Wooster, OH. It’s a 3 hour drive, so having lots of good music is crucial. Shame the latest Big Finish audio isn’t out yet – I could do with a new Sylvester McCoy adventure to listen to on the way there. No idea how often I’ll be able to check my e-mail or LiveJournal, so don’t expect to read much (if any) from me for a week. (I hear a huge sigh of relief coming from all quarters… hmmm…)

So, take care, everyone! Have fun while I’m away! And be nice to the Random Sylv Pix, dark_pheonix! 😉

With the new season upon us, it’s time I got a new seasonal icon. Much perusing of Sylv pictures ensued. But I think I’ve got it.

Started my summer job (which is my usual job, only just computers, no kids) this week. Next week is science camp (where I teach physics). And I’m taking tomorrow off. Heh. 🙂

One of the last activities that judiang and I did for the weekend was go bowling. Yesterday, we ended up going to Steak & Shake for lunch rather than Dunaways (the Irish Pub in Troy) which was yummy (mmmm – peach shake!) Then we went to one of two bowling alleys that are in Troy.

There were only two other people bowling and one of them was done before we actually got started. The other finished about halfway through our game. I kind of felt sorry for the employees who were watching the empty place.

Now, just to preface this, Judi and I suck at bowling. We both freely admit it. One of the previous times when we were bowling, neither of us could do as well as the little girls who were bowling next to us. Our main goal is to knock pins down each frame. Then, if we can, to maybe get a spare or a strike. We’d love to break a hundred – and back when I was bowling more regularly, I have done that.

Breaking 100 was not to be for us that day, alas. However, in the first game, I had 6 gutterballs in the first three frames and wasn’t able to catch up with Judi. She ended with a score of 78 to my 71. Both of us had gotten a strike in the first throw of the 10th frame, and we felt pretty impressed.

In the second game, I was finally starting to warm up and after taking turns being in the lead, I came back at the end with 2 strikes in the 10th frame for a score of 93. Judi was a consistent 77. After a 5 minute break, we started the third game, where I took the lead in the first frame and refused to give it up. I came the closest to 100 yet – 96. Judi was still consistent with a score of 80. Certainly some of our better bowling (even if it does suck). 🙂

After the game, we returned to my place where I put Judi back together again with some furious back rubbing and a hot pad. Then we headed off to the airport once again. *sniff* farewell to Judi!

On the way home, I stopped for Chinese for the ‘rents and me and we had General Tso’s and Mu Shu Chicken for supper. Mmmm!

I only worked 2 1/2 hours today and have been napping and vegging the rest of the day. Ah, summer vacation!

Actually, lazy – yes, hazy – not really, crazy – certainly not, day – yes. OK, so the Subject of my entry is only 50% correct…

Yesterday was a wonderful day for lounging about. After I finished my journal entry, I sat outside for awhile and read some more from Ivanhoe. I’m nearly done with it. Then I snoozed a bit and when the wind picked up, it woke me and I realized it was 1:30pm. Lunch time! So I scurried about. Made a fire, got the stuff out of the fridge. Nuked the leftover baked beans that my Aunt had brought the day before. Then charred the steaks for about 5 minutes and finally woke judiang. We had a nice little lunch, pausing only to heat the steaks a bit longer over the coals (OK, so another minute on the fire would have been perfect).

After lunch, Judi played Scullery Maid again and it was my turn to zonk out completely. I napped outside for awhile, enjoying the sunshine on my legs and the warm breeze. It was an absolutely perfect weather day. (And today is looking to be nearly as perfect.)

I returned indoors to help Judi with her geeking (and insisting that she post to LJ while she was actually awake). In preparation for supper, I cut up the peppers, onions, pineapple, and pork for the kebabs. I marinated the pork in soy sauce, garlic, honey, and rice wine vinegar. And after a bit, I started the sticky rice in the rice cooker and then we headed outside to make the fire. Judi made the supper fire and did another great job.

When the fire was ready, we stuck stuff on skewers and grilled away. Yummy! We kept putting more wood on the fire and poor dad’s wood pile is looking a little lean now. After supper, we just sat around the fire and chatted and watched. The sun went down and eventually the fire turned to glowing coals. Around 10:30pm, we spread the coals around to go out faster and headed back inside.

After some geeking on IRC, it was time to finish watching The Second Coming which I showed to Judi and elsaf last weekend. By the time it was done, it was well after 1am and we decided to go to bed. Just as well, since the cable had gone out – including our *ahem* internet connection.

It’s now nearly 11am. We’re pondering bowling and an Irish Pub, but we’ll see how things go.