Had one kid today in my presentation who wanted to basically give the presentation himself. He kept his hand up the whole time, excitedly wanting to inform me of things I missed, or hadn't gotten to yet, or that were just interesting, and every time I asked a question he'd urgently wave his hand harder.

I feel terrible that I can't give kids who are that excited my full attention. They're so enthusiastic and into it, and I have to turn away from them to the others as well. Especially since I was often the one who excitedly had all the information and wanted to share it because it was COOL and INTERESTING.

I felt like I was doing a disservice to him, so I tried to acknowledge that I knew he was there. But I'm not sure if saying "I know you have the answer; I'll ask someone else" helps or just makes it worse. I actually told him afterward that I was impressed at what he knew, and I was sorry I couldn't give him more attention.

How would you guys handle this? I'm a bit lost here. I hope he enjoyed his day anyway, and that he wasn't too frustrated. Sorry, kid. The conundrum of education strikes again.

Tonight we had our first neighborhood party of the year. When it started to get dark, I pointed upward.

ME: Hey, look! It's Jupiter!
NEIGHBOR KID I HADN'T MET BEFORE: Oh! And there's also a hot dog in the sky! Canis Minor!
ME: ... What grade are you in?
KID: Sixth!
ME: Have you perchance been to the Space Place?
KID: Yeah!
KID'S DAD: You work there! I knew your voice sounded familiar!
ME: And I am just pleased somebody remembered one of the things I told you about the sky!
KID: Yup! Also Betelgeuse will explode!
ME: You are exactly correct!

See, this is why I basically do stand-up astronomy. If you make dumb jokes, like saying that the two bright stars of Canis Minor seem more like a hot dog than an actual dog, kids will remember it! And then you'll feel proud and a little surreal that they do.

Bah, I missed yesterday. Well, yesterday's good thing: while my previous cherry-almond soda turned out flatter than a cheap pizza, that meant I got to make another batch! Which is pretty fun!

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Today's good thing: so I did three Space Place live dome shows in a row and it was a lot of fun, because a live show is basically a 40-minute standup comedy routine about OMG SPACE,* so yes, I totally love my job.

But! The best part today were the questions. There were some good ones. (Also the usual smart-alecky "How big is Uranus hurr hurr," except the kid pronounced it "YURR-ah-nuss" like we do to make it less dumb-sounding, which ruined the joke.) Questions like:

-What if astronauts cry in space? (Actually the answer is kind of nuts: the surface tension holds the tears to your eyes, so unless you can wipe them away you're effectively blinded by your own dang tears--a serious hazard in a spacesuit where you can't wipe them away.)
-What's Jupiter made of? If it's made of the same stuff as the sun, why isn't it a star?
-What would happen if the Andromeda and Milky Way black holes collide?
-Where would you be if you went into a black hole? (This one was fun because I got to tell them about spaghettification.)
-What if light doesn't fall into a black hole but just orbits it? (I answered this one badly, I'm afraid. Gotta brush up on photon spheres.)

So yeah, the kids were into it. I love it when the crowd is energetic but interested. And they seemed to like mine; I got a lot of compliments afterward, too.


*With visual aids! I can embiggen the Andromeda galaxy in the night sky and be like "LOOK OUT! It's going to crash into us!" and all the kids go "Woooooo" and then I can say, "No, seriously, IT'S GOING TO CRASH INTO US. Just ... it's gonna take a while."

I am having a whole lot of school flashbacks now that I'm here at the Space Place.

See, my basic job description is Tell Kids How Cool Space Is. Which is pretty great. But my coworker, the guy who tries to keep all us presenters headed in more or less the same direction, has pointed out that I am specifically good at telling gifted kids about space.

"Oh, that's common," my friend who is a bona fide teacher informed me. "You teach to your own type. It takes a conscious effort if you're teaching other types."

So I've embarked upon a crash course in figuring how to teach other types of learners. It is REALLY DIFFICULT, you guys. When I was a kid, a lot of the techniques teachers used in the classroom to try to drill some knowledge into our skulls struck me as patronizing, redundant, and stupid. My coworker assures me that had more to do with my own brain than the teachers', and that the techniques that simply annoy me--like making kids repeat vocabulary terms--are quite useful. I have no idea if that's true, because if it is my own brain, there's no way I can be objective. So I have to believe him for now and try to do a lot of education that seems to me to be counterintuitive. And I keep flashing back to being a kid who had to put with this nonsense.

It also reminds me of something that was a unique problem for a gifted kid--that unlike other types of special ed, having/being a gifted kid was seen as desirable. And that made it really hard to talk about the problems involved (like frustration with bafflingly obtuse peers,* social awkwardness, and boredom at school) without getting a lot of "CRY MOAR, EMOKID" responses. Even now, I am not sure if I should talk about my life experience because people think it's bragging, when I'm mostly trying to figure out why the hell life seems so different to me than it does to others. So the Space Place job has been surprisingly revelatory.

But! It's not all terrible! The cool thing is that we are also called upon to tailor our lesson plans for different learning styles--like, for example, GIFTED KIDS. Which means that my unique talents are useful! I offered to try finding resources to expand our current lesson plans for the kids with the same kinds of upside-down brains as my own. So I get to dig into gifted resources and try them out, and it's gonna be AWESOME. I may be weird, but at least I an use my weirdness to help other weird kids really enoy their Valuable Learning Experiences. And that's what's making the Space Place job so darn much fun.


*I must have been annoying as fuck as a kid, beause I simply didn't understand how other people couldn't grasp concepts that seemed so simple.

Recently a conflation of many disparate events--specifically, watching that Five Nights At Freddy's LP and subsequently a bunch of others, waking up my long-dormant Steam account to play with Universe Sandbox, and my brother and me trying to explain video game logic to Mom using examples from Day of the Tentacle puzzles--has made me come to a realization: I miss point-and-click games. Suddenly I've been fondly looking back on the good times I had as a tiny little game nerd floundering my way through Myst with the help of the weirdly novelish player's guide, since I lacked the cognitive development necessary to really figure out what the hell I was doing.

So I've been tooling around Steam and my Kindle's app store trying to satisfy my dopamine needs,* sampling various games based on important factors like user reviews and, importantly, what's on sale. And it's working--I'm having a fine old time playing casual and more in-depth adventure games. So far I've enjoyed The Book of Unwritten Tales (fun puzzles, humor like Bad Discworld), its prequel the Critter Chronicles (where, to their credit, the humor got less annoying), and a stack of Artifex Mundi and similar casual games (which offer about a million layers of sociological analysis fodder, what with way they seem to market to females and are less "hardcore" but more story-driven with tragic romance and so forth, but fuck you they're PRETTY and the stories aren't bad). I have a few others queued up (Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People has been on my list for a while) but am always looking for more. If you give me a good space-themed casual adventure puzzle game, I will ... well, probably I'll just be very happy, but if we turn "make Amelia happy" into an achievement, your brain will think it's a real reward, and that'll be great!

Probably I'm overdoing it at the moment because I'm excited about this, and it could easily become a money pit if I'm not careful,** but it's really nice to return to some absurd problem-solving adventure.

By the way, I'm Polmelia on Steam, if anyone's interested, too!


*I wonder why something like managing to make a cup of tea comes with such a feeling of triumph in video games when in reality locating a kettle, tea bags, teapot, mug, and tea leaves filling the kettle with water, turning on the stove, boiling the water, pouring the tea leaves and the boiling water into the teapot, letting it steep for fourish minutes, and pouring the tea through the strainer into the mug is just a thing you do to get tea. It's almost as if game design has tapped into a collection of terrifyingly effective psychological hacks. I hope they use this awesome power responsibly.

**I have a complicated thing going right now where I OWN Portal 2 but can't actually PLAY it because [pointless boring computer fuckery]. I could easily re-buy it on Steam, but dammit I already own it so I'll just save it for when I fix my computer fuckery. Money, dangit!

Like most of my contemporary third-grade literati, I was a big fan of Brian Jacques' Redwall books, epic tales of the high adventures of mousies and their fellow woodland critters. They were an entirely new kind of fantasy for my narrow little brain in that they were almost completely devoid of magic--only a little bit of possibly mystical reincarnation, if that--but by god they were full of humor, swashbuckly swordfighting, heroic stunts, dastardly villains, colorful allies, and vivid settings.

And of course there was the food porn.

Oh, GOD, the food porn. I remember reading that Brian Jacques grew up in England during World War II, and if he wasn't exactly starving, there was never quite enough food, and what there was had an uninspiring quality to it. So he took to reading cookbooks like they were porn, and always lingered on feast scenes in the stories he was reading. And when he wrote his own stories, there was always at least one feast, with loving attention paid to describing every single dish on the menu. Holy shit when Mom read those books aloud to us we would get SO DAMN HUNGRY.

And the centerpiece of the food, for me, was always the moles' signature dish, the Turnip'n'Tater'n'Beetroot Deeper'n'Ever Pie. God DAMN that thing sounded good. In those days there was no Redwall Cookbook, and there MIGHT have been Redwall.net but the internet wasn't A Thing yet, so we just had to make up our own recipe. Mom tried many variations, but it wasn't till I came across a different book, Maggie Black's Medieval Cookbook, that it all came together. I combined her recipe for mushroom pasties with my own Deeper'n'Ever Pie recipe and voila! THE GREATEST FOOD EVER.

And I always celebrate Hobbit Day with one, because I think the hobbits and the moles would probably agree on what makes a damn fine savory pie, especially with the addition of mushrooms. So I'm gonna share my recipe with you, and if you want to celebrate a couple of great books with some great pie, be my guest!

Deeper'N'Ever Pie - Hobbit Variation

What You Need:

1-2 potatoes, peeled and small diced
1-2 carrots, peeled and small-diced
1-2 beets
1/2 lb mushrooms, sliced
1 small onion, chopped
2 cups cheddar cheese, shredded (well, to taste. I like cheese)*
extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 tsp. mustard powder
salt
pepper
2 pie crusts (I use Pillsbury because while I am good at some kitchen things, pie crusts are MYSTERIOUS ALCHEMY)

What You Do:

Preheat the oven to 350F.

Parboil the beets whole, until they are soft, in one saucepan. When they are done, peel them (they're easier to peel after they've been boiled) and small-dice them, then toss them in a big mixing bowl

While that's going on, parboil the chopped carrots and potatoes in another saucepan. Drain them and dump them into that same mixing bowl

Lightly saute the onions and mushrooms in olive oil. Add them to the bowl

Now toss the vegetables till they're good and mixed. Mix in 2-3 tablespoons olive oil, 1/2 tsp. mustard powder, and dashes of salt and pepper.

Mix in the shredded cheese.

Now put one of the pie crusts in your pie pan. Then dump the filling in!

Cover with the other pie crust. Pinch the crusts' edges together. Punch a few holes artistically in the top crust with a fork.

Bake for 30-35 minutes.

Ta-da! You have an amazing Deeper'n'Ever Pie to share with your friends. Mom likes it with sour cream (Mom likes EVERYTHING with sour cream), but I like it plain. Maybe with an apple beer or some ginger ale, or some mulled ginger apple cider if you have it on hand. But no matter how you serve it, enjoy--and raise a glass of whatever you're drinking with it to Brian Jacques, who wrote some amazing books. Here's to you, Mr. Jacques.


*I have no idea where the moles got cheese. Only bad guys seem to eat meat in the Redwall universe; the good guys WILL eat fish when it's available, but they're mostly vegetarian. They're only vegan because they have to be, though--I think there's a passing mention of cattle in Redwall itself, but that was the first one published and the continuity got retconned so there is no good source of milk. But by god Jacques wants cheese and cream and butter, so he cheats with something called "greensap milk." I'm cheating right back with "actual milk" products.

There are some bottles of experimental Earl Grey cream soda settling up in the fridge. I'll let y'all know how it tastes. If it goes well, I may try some Pride of the Port soda next.

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Have been taking up jewelry-making again. Taking chainmaille a bit more seriously this time around. It's always difficult to get started with something, but this place has a few great starter kits. Plus, it's got colorful jump rings, and I am a sucker for colors. So far I'm trying a simple Box Chain rainbow necklace. I'm idiotically proud of how closely I'm managing to get the jump rings closed.

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In the meantime, I've come across some pretty nifty-looking images of handmade LED Zelda-style Fairy-Inna-Bottle necklaces, but none of them are for sale. So I went with the next logical course of action and decided to make it myself.

Problem is, my knowlege of electricity is roughly that of a fifth-grader working through Fifty Fun Science Projects You Can Do At Home: something something battery something zinc copper something something circuit something LIGHT! And, y'know, for some reason I've picked up the impression that a potato is involved somehow. So I called my brother, what with him being an electrical engineer and all,* and he offered me some tips. The rest has been trial, error, and a lot of Googling. Oh, and gathering components. Once I get that done, the rest should be easy.

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Mom got herself some roller skates, too. Now we just have to find a place to skate--outdoors, possibly, as spring gets moving.

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I have mastered the art of Fish'n'Chips. I'd make myself a medal, but I'm already making a few other necklaces, and that would just be redundant.


*On the one hand, this a running joke along the lines of asking a linguist how many languages they speak. "Can you program my TV? I mean, you ARE an electrician!" No, he's an electrical engineer. On the other hand, though, I figured he probably knew a LITTLE more about practical circuitry than me and my potato.

Mini Addy seems to have gotten the travel bug. When I went to California back in November (shut up I told you I'd get to this eventually), she came with me, because who doesn't like checking out new places? And California has so many interesting places to check out!



This time we're taking the train. Addy's been on road trips, plane trips, and even boat trips, but never on a train trip. And it's doubly exciting to board at 11:30 pm.



In the roomette Addy wanted the top bunk at first ...



... but then she realized it was more fun on the bottom because she could watch the lights go by through the window.



We made it to Sacramento! This was where Addy would meet my grandmother--and they got along very well. I knew they would!

( But THEN What Did We Do? )