Adventures

Friday was a fun day because not only did my Dinosaur class go on a field trip, but James came too! Since he has a BYU van driving permit, and not many people in my class do, my professor was happy that James volunteered to drive a load of people up Spanish Fork Canyon. I was happy too.

Apparently when the professor said "field trip" he meant "stopping at random points on the side of the freeway and scrambling around looking for rocks." It was fun though! At our first stop, we were told there were fossils everywhere and we should find one. We ran up a steep hill full of rocks, and while looking around, I told James "I don't know how to find a fossil." He explained that you just had to pick up these smooth flat rocks and break them open to see if there was anything between the layers of sediment. Taking his advice, I picked up a nearby rock and hit it on another rock to break it open. And there it was! A fossil! Seriously, it was that easy!

We also found some ripple marks, in mudstone where a river used to be.

Some more pictures from the field trip!

My professor showing everybody a rock with a wormy trail in it

Even though my shoes were filled with red sand, to complement the red sand that was still in them from our Arches trip last summer, it was okay because after we got home, we went to go see

Calculus! The Musical!!!

I know, I know. It sounds nerdy. Well it was. However, it was VERY entertaining. For me. James is the best husband, because he humored me by coming along even though he couldn't differentiate the jokes from the critical points. At any rate, he must have been approaching his limit of tolerance for the whole function! He's just so great. :)

After that it was still pretty early on a Friday night. So instead of watching a movie, we decided to go play racquetball! It was really fun. I got hit in the face by a racquetball but was really lucky because nothing bad happened. I am really glad for the glasses! They are specially designed to fit so that if you get hit in the eye, it really doesn't hurt or do any damage. (The eye would be the worst place to get hit.) James even has glasses to go over his glasses! Glasception.

On Saturday James went on an all-day field trip. They drove to Black Rock Desert and got to go inside some lava tubes (volcano tunnels)! Some of them were made of basalt, and some were made of rhyolite.

Geologists in their natural habitat

And the most handsome one of all:

James and his magical photography!

While he was gone my mom and sister Emily came to watch the General Women's meeting with me! It was really fun. We made tomato soup (Caroline's) and biscuits, and cake cookies. I liked seeing them. It was perfect because at the meeting they talked a lot about how women of all different generations need each other. We sure do!

My best sister Emily

The best mom ever!

Yummy cake cookies (my mom's famous chocolate cake mix + white chocolate chips = happiness)

Delectable biscuits that my mom made for us in about 5 seconds.

Then afterwards we watched Frozen. It's finally the first time I've seen it! James the geologist arrived back before we finished the movie, so we went to go pick him up and then he got to see the last half. It was a long but really great day!

A closeup of hot chocolate to bring you joy. 

Courtesy of James.

How to make an icosahedron

Well, here you have it.

I was having a really hard time focusing on math homework and wasn't hungry, so I had no idea what to do. James suggested that I take a study break to color. He knows I like coloring. So I decided to make a Platonic solid.

Requirements of Platonic solids:

1. All of the sides are identical regular polygons (shapes where all the sides and angles are equal)
2. Each vertex (pointy part) is identical

In other words, they are perfectly symmetrical in pretty much every way.

I made the icosahedron, a 20-sided shape. Some other examples are:

• tetrahedron (triangular pyramid)
• octahedron (8-sided shape; two 4-sided pyramids stuck together)
• dodecahedron (12-sided shape; looks kind of like the one above but is made of pentagons)
• hexahedron (AKA cube)

And... hmmm, I can't think of any more examples. Oh, that's because I've run out of examples! There are only 5 possible Platonic solids in the whole universe! (No, but really.)

And there are only 3 polygons in the universe that could ever be used to make a Platonic solid, which are equilateral triangles, regular pentagons, and squares. If you want to know why, I'll put a link to the explanation later tonight. It is really pretty cool and not even hard to understand.

So the reason I made one of these is that BYU had a 6th-8th grade STEM fair (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) last weekend. A friend and I volunteered to run a booth and we decided to have the kids color and make Platonic solids. I had a lot of fun actually!

Here's our booth!

Kinda blurry, but it shows stacks of the 5 Platonic solids and a stack of handouts which I made, which were pretty cool if I do say so myself. (They had a picture of Plato on them.) And all the crayons, markers, string, scissors and tape that the Math Education department provided for us. There's also my computer playing a video about Platonic solids. Here it is if you are interested. And taped on the edge of the table are geometry definitions like vertex and polygon.

Here are pictures of the papers and the poster.

I really liked how the poster had the shapes glued to it and hanging off of it from strings. For some reason I didn't get a close-up of them.

I was told that over 250 middle school kids were coming, so we asked for 400 papers. I figured that most would only want 1, but some would want to make all 5. But I really overestimated! I think it's because the kids would get a prize if they visited all the booths so they had to hurry through them. I still have a giant stack of papers even after telling everybody to take extras to make at home! (Because who really wants to make a Platonic solid in their free time right?)

But it was fun to stamp their cute little papers. It was also pretty fun to watch them make the Platonic solids. Some did it very neatly and didn't need help, others just stuck it together willy-nilly and had to take it apart to readjust. Some would spend loads of time coloring, and some even taped a string to it.

Then when I got home, James had cleaned the apartment and put away all the laundry! He is really the best. I guess he's more productive when I'm not there. I fear what will happen when he's gone all day this Saturday.

Oven

One day, I decided to make the Moore sugar cookies, but sadly the oven began to smoke when I preheated it. So, I turned it off.

And on the bottom was a big pile of grease... Yuck. And I don't even remember spilling anything!

So we put the cookies in the fridge and I bought oven cleaner. The oven isn't self cleaning but even if it was, it probably would have smoked us out. The only catch was that whoever designed the oven cleaner must not have realized that people would eventually need to open it. It took me 20 minutes to get the lid off.

But then it took much longer to get the greasy goopy gook off the oven. I did most of it but it was still smoking when I turned it on. So I gave up for the week ( I used school and work as the excuse because I thought it would take an hour or two more) and didn't bake anything. Slowly, and silently, one-half at a time, the cookies in the fridge began to disappear.

Then, James the Nice Cleaner Man took a look at the oven and it turned out I forgot to clean the top of the inside. I guess it didn't cross my mind that grease can spill upwards. (In an Escher oven.)

This picture is dedicated to Emily.

So James cleaned it and then no smoke! Side note: James really likes having a clean house. So much so that he cleans it! I like that. It also helps motivate me to clean more because I know he will notice and be happy about it.

So we baked the dwindling supply of cookies. We ate them so fast that there are no pictures, but we put some of that dinosaur blue frosting on them. (Mom, you were right. It tasted a kinda funny.)

Then we tried Carla's banana bread with Caroline's topping. As you may notice, the topping was..........too clumpy. (For some reason I though it would just kind of melt all over the bread....but it stayed in clumps.)

But it was still yummy! :) 

 

Classes

Somehow, James and I managed to have our morning classes at the same time every day. It's great because even though I don't wake up for morning classes, James does. At first he tried waking me up by just talking to me. But then he realized that when he said "It's time to wake up," and I said "Okay," I actually meant "Shush. I'm sleeping." Then he tried pulling the covers off, but that just made me mad. (It might work in the summer, though.) By now he just gets up, flips the lights on and goes into the shower. Sometimes I feel bad, and sometimes I feel REEEEALLY sleepy.

Anyway, the classes I'm taking aren't too bad except for abstract algebra where basically, Lagrange is the Picasso of group theory and I might accidentally mistake S₃ for my favorite uncle. But the other classes are okay, which are math teaching practicum, dinosaurs, and racquetball.

James is also taking lots of hard classes like statistics, petrology, and structural geology. He also happens to be taking racquetball. He's really good at doing all his homework, even when he gets super frustrated. With statistics. He just took a couple of midterms and said that he feels pretty good about them!

So today I'm working on finishing up a draft of a term paper for my dinosaurs class. I've never actually had a "term paper" assigned before this year. It was always just called a research paper, or just a paper. Or, most often in my major, a couple of paragraphs. That's what I love about math. 

My term paper is about Archaeopteryx, which is a bird dinosaur.

Alternatively known as Ratbird. 

 

As for racquetball, it's pretty fun! 

Quick summary of the game Racquetball

You are in a big box with a rubber ball, a whacker racquet, and a person who wants to whack the ball at every possible surface (which is legal). The only armor you are granted is a pair of eyeglasses. 

As long as I'm with James, it's fine, because he's nice to me. But sometimes the teacher makes us play "King of the Court," just because BYU happens to have 20 racquetball courts. I'm pretty much always the lowly peasant of the court. James is probably good enough to be a merchant or tradesman. But that may soon change, because our apartment complex has a racquetball court! So we should use that as we're paying for it anyway.

By the way, something fun you can shout at people playing racquetball is: "Hey! Quiet down in there! What's with all the racquet?!" (That one was just for Abbey.)

Well anyway, classes are going all right! Since I just had a Relief Society lesson about being optimistic, I've decided to try to have positive thinking and enjoy my classes for the rest of the semester. It's my last real semester!!! And James will soon follow.

Here's an inspirational video. If this dot matrix printer can survive, so can you.

New Camera

Last week, James got a present in the mail! It was a shiny new Canon 6D, sent lovingly to him from himself. He also ordered a new lens which arrived shortly after. Even to a non-photographer (me) it looks pretty awesome! The other day, we were both looking at it and then at the same time said, "It looks so cool." That's because now that we're married, we can actually read each other's minds and communicate in telepathy to be able to say the exact same thing at the same time. So if we ever seem like we're not talking to each other, we actually are, in our minds.

So apparently this lens is not a fisheye, but it does look like a bubble. It's actually a rectilinear lens, which is a wide angle lens that distorts at the edges of the pictures, but unlike a fisheye it doesn't make it look curved. Instead it makes it look stretched. Here is the lens:

Hello, Dave. You're looking well today.

And here is a photo of the new camera. How did we take this picture, you ask?! It's such a mystery! But magicians never reveal their secrets.

Don't mind that apparatus on the top. 

Here are some cool pictures James took with the new lens! James and his magical photography.

 

Not with the special lens, but I liked it anyway:

"The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal--, a mindbogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you."