July 27th, 2019 – Downtown

It’s 4:14 pm. Yesterday I mostly worked on getting the first activity ready for my class, and in the afternoon I did my “pull” workout.  I watched “Comedians in Cars Drinking Coffee” on the exercise bike, and a woman came over and complained that it was too loud, she was trying to work on a research problem on her bicycle.  Guess I should have brought out my headphones. Haha. It is annoying when other people play their phones in public, not sure why I decided to do it.

 

Yesterday evening we Pho with beef ribs, bok choy, and a chicken with mushroom dish.  The pho with noodle was especially tasty.  After dinner, we decided to head to a bar downtown with the kids and Ying Ying.  We decided to go to Tyler’s in the American Tobacco District. We had to pay $7 to use the parking garage because there was a Bull’s game.  I decided to drive to the top to get a view. The garage is 7 stories tall.  We took a bunch of pictures.

 

American Tobacco has this creek running all along it, which got the kids really excited and running around.  Tyler’s had closed down two months prior.  It’s been there since before I got to Duke, guess there’s just a lot more restaurant options now.  But they had a beer garden with some DJ guy really into his kind of crappy mix, with the obligatory girlfriend standing next to him acting really into it. I tried 3 beers and got one.

 

Then we decided to move on, walking towards the Bulls stadium. The Durham Bulls were playing the Buffalo Bison. That’s a lot of Bull. I asked the gate lady if there was a time during the game when you could go in for free. She said no, but there were free tickets available. Nice!  We went in for a while and ate some ice cream.  Not only was it the kids first baseball game, but it was also the first for Ying Ying.  She had only been to basketball and ping pong games before.

 

After 30 min or so we left to go back home, didn’t get the kids in bed until 9:30.

 

Today we went to the Children’s museum in the morning. Harvey and Alexandra ran around, climbed stuff, played in the sand, played instruments, saw the animals, saw the Dinosaurs, and dug for fossils.  Had to stop by Harris Teeter on the way home to pick up some groceries.  Just made some fruit salad and pasta salad for the “Goat Roast” at Richard Palmer’s house tonight. First time for me to go to that event.

July 26th, 2019 – Balls and Springs

It’s 9:07 am.  Yesterday I forgot to write a blog. I just came in, started working, and forgot about it. Generally, once I get momentum on a task it’s hard to stop.  Yesterday it was working on how to attach the gel to the polymer base in our implant.  I have some ideas using covalent bonding chemistry, hopefully, it helps.

 

The day before yesterday, Wed, I hardly remember what I did. It seems like I spent time working on my class, partly searching for activities to do, which I’m spending too much time on.  Last night I had the idea to make models of solids composed of springs connected to spheres.  I searched about it and found one old previous example from France published in 1971.  Then I became obsessed about how to recreate it in a much easier way.  I think I came up with an idea that will be easier involved molding PLA into spheres with the bonding points labeled, then jamming the springs into the melted PLA. Now I have to try it out.

 

We got a thank you card in the mail from Avery yesterday for her pink piano birthday present. Alexandra likes the drawing inside and tried to add to the card with the same color as Avery’s drawing.

 

The day before yesterday we went to the playground, and yesterday we did the same thing.  Alexandra likes to climb this spiral thing, go down the slide, go on the monkey bars with my help, and swing.  On the swing she likes to kick my butt, then I pretend to get angry and run at her, swinging her high in the air. Harvey likes to run around doing random things and get chased.

 

The day before yesterday I made watermelon juice and poured it into a popsicle mold we bought at Walmart for $1.  The kids loved eating the popsicles yesterday. They have food trucks on Thursdays down by the playground and we ended up buying a holy cannoli. It was a deep-fried tube filled with very sweet cream and the ends topped with chocolate chips.  I really regretted eating it.  I think the caffeine in the chocolate chips was one reason I couldn’t stop thinking about balls and springs and fall asleep until 1 am.

July 24th, 2019 – Rainy Day Cookies

It’s 8:58 am. I got to work and immediately found the library book that I was looking for yesterday because it was recalled.  Yea!  Good start to the day.

 

Yesterday rained most of the day, and for some reason I was not in a good mood. I mostly worked on materials for my class this fall, trying to figure out what to do to have the students learn about metals.  Finally, this morning I came up with the idea for a shape memory alloy lab.  That’s the extent of the idea.  Someone must have done it before and I can copy or modify what they did. This will be a good lab because it will introduce students to phase transformations and mechanical properties. And it will be fun. I can also have the students write a report about a particular type of alloy. Maybe that will be less work for me.

 

Since it was raining last night we stayed in and made some cookies.  We had the kids try to punch out different animal shapes from a tortilla, then we coated the animals with butter, sugar, and cinnamon, and baked for 8 minutes at 350 C. They were very tasty.  I ate like 3 or 4 of them.  I think the kids ate 2 or 3 each.  We got them to bed by 9 pm and then we went to bed around 9:40. The book I’m reading, “The Beginning of Infinity” by David Deutsch helped put me to sleep. Had a nice long sleep.