Physics and Me

I have never been great at science. In fact in high school, I was so bad at chemistry that Doc counseled me during my first semester not to even think about taking a second semester. Doc, our science teacher had been a professor of one of the sciences at Harvard. He was an eccentric, Jewish man who had escaped the worst the Nazi's had to offer and, yet, was a little afraid when I was in the lab. I liked Doc, but I just did not grasp the higher sciences. It is this cavalier attitude toward physics that robbed me of more than an hour of precious Christmas knitting time.

Winter has come to Cincinnati. The temperature has dropped to just around freezing and we have already gotten some snow that has hung around for a few days. Hubby is in Minneapolis on business and I am out of school and don't work on Thursdays, so I used the time off today to get some Christmas shopping done. I had purchased several gifts and had lunch at a place I love and Hubby hates. It was shaping up to be a good day. I went to the car with my bags and opened the trunk. I was greeted by a royal mess.

In my family, we have a flexible attitude toward Christmas. We celebrate the holiday whenever we are together. Sometimes that means we have Christmas in July, February or any other time that finds the majority of us together under one roof. While looking for a totally unrelated Christmas gift, we were in a store that sold flavored syrups. My mom loves flavored iced tea, so I bought a couple of bottles. Because we would be celebrating in a couple of weeks, I left the syrup in the trunk of the car, not thinking that the primary ingredient in syrup is WATER. Now, I know enough of physics to know that water, unlike most liquids expands when it freezes instead of contracting. Unfortunately, the glass bottle the syrup is packaged in does not expand.

I was picking glass from the EXPLODED bottle and cleaning up the sticky mess out in the cold for quite some time. Yeah!!!

In Christmas knitting news, I am chugging right a long. I have just about gotten all the knitting for next week's Christmas finished. I don't have a schedule, yet, but I have had to resist the temptation to add tons more knitting to the list.

With Hubby gone, it has been a me-tv and knitting extravaganza. For some reason he doesn't like some of my favorite knitting movies: Chocolat, The Ninth Gate, and Tombstone. Johnny Depp, Johnny Depp and Val Kilmer. Chocolate in all its incarnations, books and more books, and quotable quips like "Skin that smoke wagon and see what happens." and "It's true, you are a good woman. Then again, you may be the anti-Christ." It has been good to sit and knit pretty much uninterrupted for a few hours to get the factory caught up.

I have succumbed to one act of avarice, though. While winding some Mountain Colors Mountain Goat in Winter Sky, I was so taken with the colors (deep, rich blues, purples and pinks) and the luminous sheen of the mohair that I could not allow myself to knit something for someone else out of that yarn. So, looks like I am getting a new scarf after all the Christmas knitting is over.