Author: chris

Bet you thought the title of this post was a toddler quote.  Nope.   It was me.  Yesterday G did the first thing of her life that really grossed me out.  Given that for all of her life so far she’s been a baby and a toddler, I think I can boast that I’m not that easily grossed out.

She is getting more and more autonomous and opinionated and able, and this is making life lively and challenging.  She’s also waking up earlier from her afternoon naps, which, in conjunction with the milder weather, and the later sundown, means we have a chance to do something outside before her suppertime.

Yesterday we were in the conservatory fixing a bike, and I was reminded, by not being able to move without bumping into something, we have too many objects in there.  One of these objects is a Graco Quattro stroller/buggy/”travel system”/thing, which is huge and which we haven’t used in months (kind of like the conservatory).  It was great, with the carrycot, when G was too small to sit up.  We used a lighter one when it became practical, and for various reasons, over time, we’ve fallen out of the habit of using a stroller at all.

This point was illuminated the other day, when I gave G a ride around the yard in the smaller stroller and she said “wheeee!”  Yesterday she recognized the Graco as another rolling chair and insisted on a ride in that too.  It really looks nice and cushy for a toddler, actually, and she was reluctant to get out.  She kept closing the snack tray in front of her every time I swung it up to take her out.

It was all fun and games up until that point.

Brrrr.  I’m still getting the heebie-jeebies thinking about this.

I got G out of the buggy so I could take photos of it, in the hopes of selling it and regaining a large footprint of floorspace.  G puttered around gathering rocks and snail shells.

Finished with my photo session, I rolled the buggy back in next to where she sat, absorbed in probing around with a finger in one of her snail shells.

Then I noticed it wasn’t.  Just.  A shell.

What happened next is hopefully not that I’ve just given G an irrational aversion to the sight or feel of squished invertebrates.  Because I have that irrational aversion and it’s not very useful.  I asked her rather sternly to put the snail down.  I struggled ridiculously to get that thing out of her hands without touching anything goopy (i.e. anything relevant) myself.  She tried valiantly to evade my hands and manage one more squish.  It is only amusing in retrospect.

I took the thing away, and then I washed her hands.  A lot.  And I think I probably said “eeeewwww” more than a level-headed parent would deem wise.  As it turns out, snail guts are kind of sticky.  Ordinary soap didn’t get the greenish chunks off, but Reinol scrubby soap did.  G seemed bemused by the extra-thorough handwashing and stayed fairly chirpy throughout the process.  She may have come through it unscathed.

When I showed F my pictures from the afternoon, he thought G looked pretty comfy in that big buggy and suggested we take her out in it this weekend.  Looks as though we may be rationalizing some procrastination on decluttering the conservatory.  It’s just as well I’d had that “duh” moment during my little photo shoot when I remembered one of the reasons we bought that model in the first place: it folds up really small!

Science has a way of being imagined to need dressing up before going out in public.  It’s obvious when scientists are depicted on TV, but also manifests in publicity photos for real labs or equipment.

It’s common to add coloured lights shining upward onto people’s faces (try that sometime while you’re working) and reflecting off of available metal surfaces.

If there is protective gear in the lab, there will be a temptation to use it for any photo shoot, regardless of its inapplicability to a normal working situation.  If this gear can be silver, or have a dark visor to reflect some coloured lights off of, all the better.

To indicate the imminence of a discovery, we may see one or more workers peering intently at something, which is either lit up with coloured lights, or actually emitting coloured light, as though the interesting thing that may be about to happen will be measured by noticing when the coloured lights look just right.

Coloured lights seem to be the key to the interestingness of a technical activity.

In fact, we have many coloured lights in our lab. But they are there only partly to make it seem more interesting.  A lot of them are LEDs indicating things like switch positions or numerical readings, kind of like the power button on your TV and the numbers on your clock radio.  (Aside: Notice the demonstration of additive colour mixing where the out-of-focus red and greed LED spots overlap!)

There are also hot filaments and furnaces that emit light.  If you look carefully at this photo you can see the special coveralls we do, in fact, wear, whether sitting in front of the computer workstation that controls the various instruments or peering intently at coloured lights through a viewport.  Also a sliver of the awesome blue banded bouffant cap that goes with it.

There are also lights on the ceiling and lamps pointing in the windows of chambers so we can see inside.  They’re white.

What would be a useful addition, light-wise, is one of those UV-emitting lights I could shine on a sample to tell me if my line of investigation is a dead end or not.

From watching cop shows on TV, it seems such a unit is standard issue for detectives and spies, and the principle of operation appears to be thus:  Shine it on a potential piece of evidence and ask it a question.  As far as I can discern, it can determine most types of physical and biological properties of any sample, the sole limitation being that you only get one question per episode and it has to be the yes/no type.  If the answer is “yes,” then the sample will glow purple or blue.  I haven’t been able to find a supplier for this apparatus yet, though.

I’m sure we could source a blue spotlight to shine on this nice stainless steel though, and I’m thinking maybe a red one for the other side. Yes?

Today was sunnier and warmer than forecast. We were all home around lunchtime, and we took advantage of the chance to play together in the yard.  I played with my camera, and F played with my other camera.  G played with grass, flowers, rocks, and dirt. Oh, and a soccer ball, for about twenty seconds. I refer to both cameras as mine, you’ll note — they are mine, all mine! Unless I want there to be any pictures of me that don’t involve a mirror or have a curiously wide angle and, often, a foreshortened arm at the bottom.

G obviously shares my opinion that our lawn mower doesn’t work very well.  She sat for a good while ripping intently at the grass with both hands until the spot in front of her was nicely trimmed.  Seeing what a good job she’d done at that location, I picked her up and shifted her by about a foot to get a more even lawn treatment. She didn’t appreciate having to start over, and returned to the original spot to make sure it was good and bald.

I was challenging myself to get some shots of G’s hands at work.  My Panasonic LX3 is better than my SLR (with the lenses I have) for close-up pictures, but with those hands up to all sorts of interesting things, the autofocus and shutter response times were a serious frustration.  When she moved on to collecting and moving small rocks, I had a little more luck.

Still, most of the images were like this, or worse.  G is pretty enthusiastic about cameras, so shove a lens within a centimetre of her hands and she’s likely to want to interact.  Despite the fact that she’s already splitting her attention between the rocks in one hand and the hair elastic in the other, she finds a spare finger to prod the lens with.  She multitasks so much better than I do.

I like this shot.  It’s in focus! !  !  OK, well it’s natural that you wouldn’t be as impressed with that as I am.  Anyway, I also like the record of the rock-feeling stage she’s at right now.  She’s generally got at least two in her hand when we go inside, and I’m astonished that she lets me take them and put them outside the door “for next time.”  She doesn’t forget to pick them up the next time she’s out, either.

Whoa, she laid down and held still for a minute.

I had picked a flower so I could cheat at taking macro pictures of it from different angles.  G enjoyed it when I was done.

She investigated its properties thoroughly.

Aha, well, if you didn’t want to see a macro photo of the face of a dirty toddler with a runny nose, you’ve just discovered that you’ve come to the wrong place.

I am seriously considering entering this one in PW’s macro photography assignment.