Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Penny in Boots

Winter is coming...

which means it is getting cold, wet and dark around here. It makes me glad that I won't have to trek across campus much more in the near future, or stand out in the near-freezing rain waiting for the campus shuttle.

There are some lovely things about this. Baking or cooking has the welcome side effect of warming up the kitchen, and a little of the dining room. Casseroles and stews are back on the menu.  I get to pull out the quilts and afghans that languish in closets so much of the year. 

 I get to watch my dog wear boots. 

If you have never stumbled across the videos of dogs wearing boots for the first time, welcome to the internet, and allow me to assure you they are hilarious. 

Penny is small enough, and has enough chihuahua in her, that the vet recommended we get her boots for when it is cold and wet. We are not doing it because we are mean, but because we want to prevent frostbite. The fact that she is unbelievably funny while wearing them is just a happy side effect (for us). 

She is not exactly happy, but she is pretty docile while you put them on. As soon as you set her free, she is determined not to wear them anymore. The first time we put them on her, she wobbled over to a carpeted area and immediately worked them off. Ditto the second time out.

The third time out was even funnier, because she actually kept them on for a little while. She managed about 10 minutes, intermittently walking funny, just standing there  and trying to get them off.

I'm hoping eventually she stops fighting them, so she can enjoy whatever snow we get this year, and keep jogging even when it is freezing. 

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Christ the King Sunday Mediation

Today is Christ the King Sunday, which is the last Sunday in the liturgical year for Christians who keep the liturgical calendar (some denominations ignore everything except Christmas, Easter and Pentecost).

This is the Sunday where we celebrate something that, in some sense, has not happened yet. Christ has triumphed over the grave, he has ascended into heaven, the gates of death and hell are broken, but we still live in a sinful world. The Kingdom of Heaven may have  broken in on the world, but we are not yet living in the new Heaven and new Earth.

Christ the King Sunday looks forward to the day that we are living in the new Heaven and the new Earth. The time when God shall dwell among us once again, when the lion shall lie down with the lamb, when the swords shall be beaten into plowshares and the faithful live in the City of God.

The life of a Christian can feel as futile as raking leaves in the fall. No matter how hard you try, you know you are always going to sin. You are never going to feed everyone. You can never bring everyone to Christ. You can never live up to your own expectations, let alone the expectations of God.

This Sunday reminds us of our goal. We are running a race, and this reminds us of the finish line. It's out there, and it will be wonderful. No more sickness, no more death, no more tears. It lets us end our year on a high note, and then we slide gently back into the hope and expectation of Advent.

~PhysicsGal

Saturday, November 23, 2013

Shower Saga Update

Now that all the damage has been done, and the insurance company has finished its investigations, it is time to begin repairs. Firstly, to get our lives back and our house in order, but also to release from captivity the portion of repair money the insurance company is holding hostage until we demonstrate we are using the money for repairs and not for... I'm not sure what else we would use it for. Parachute pants?

It is turning out to be surprisingly difficult to locate a drywall person to repair our ceiling. Anyone we've been able to get a recommendation for is either too busy to take a small job, or has retired. So the search for a reputable drywaller continues. But we were able to get recessed lights put in (not technically part of the repairs, but if the ceiling had to be open, may as make the best of it) and we will get carpet installed in short order (Thanksgiving makes next week too short, but hopefully the week after). 


There is two awesome things about the recessed lights. One, I get way more light over my stove and all my food prep areas. Two, I got rid of the ugliest, most useless light fixture that was off center with the rest of the light fixtures. As a bonus, the electrician found and removed some wire that had gotten nicked, most likely during the removal of the ceiling, and was a fire hazard.

So, I have found the silver lining in  a very wet cloud.

~PhysicsGal

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Penny, one year later

Wednesday marked one year since we met Penny and took her home with us. We were happy before, but we didn't know how much we were missing until she came into our lives.

Sitting in her chair. Dear Husband only thinks it's his. 

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Refractive Index: Ninja Fish

It's been a while since I promised to explain the Ninja Fish, and here it is, at long last. 

This is for you, sister. Sorry I couldn't get it animated.

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Chicken Pot Pie

Chicken pot pie is the pot roast of the poultry world. Everyone has their own recipe, usually based on a family recipe passed on from mom or grandma. It is comforting, warm, and homey. It can be as simple or as fancy as you want. It combines all necessary elements of a meal into one delicious dish (carb, protein, vegetable, gravy). It is a special level of awesome.

My chicken pot pie is pretty basic as far as ingredients go. Chopped or shredded chicken, carrots, peas and onions in gravy, baked under a crust. However, mine strays from tradition slightly in that instead of just sauteing my onions, I let them caramelize to a deep mahogany brown.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

An Orgy of Cooking

After nearly a month of being unable to really cook, first because I was down a hand and then because of the great shower disaster, I tried to make up for at least a week of it, all this weekend. I was, in fact, so busy cooking I forgot to take pictures!

It began on Friday night, after an afternoon of joyous grocery shopping. I rubbed a bone-in/skin-on split chicken breast with a dry brine* and let it sit, uncovered, in my fridge for a few hours before roasting it on a bed of stuffing with some carrots and serving with a caesar salad as a starter, and mini desserts from Whole foods for dessert (pecan tarts for Dear Husband, cheese cake drops for me. I have perfected neither). After weeks of take out and frozen dinners, it tasted like heaven, and it had a lovely presentation to boot.

Friday, November 15, 2013

The end of a long series of long weeks

After nearly a month of insanity in one form or another, life is finally returning to normal. My house is quiet, and workmen are not traipsing in and out on  a daily basis to find more destruction. When different workmen start traipsing in, it will be to repair things. My fingers are as healed as they are going to get, only slightly scarred and with minimal loss of sensation. My qualifying exam is past and gone and I never have to do that again.

 For the first time in a month, I went grocery shopping and *didn't* head for the ready-to-eat or frozen food sections. I could stock up on dry goods in the cheaper dry goods/bad produce store and replenish my fruits and veggies and meat that were lost in the great shower disaster at the good produce/high-falutin' dry goods store. Errands on Friday has become my little routine and it feels so nice to have it back.

Jogging has been going well, although running in the cold is highlighting my need for winter running tops. Old cotton shirts get really cold once they get damp, so I foresee a nice athletic fabric jacket-shirt in my future.

And of course, I can finally clean my kitchen and get it somewhat back to normal, at least until the ceiling is repaired.

Overall, from here on out looks a lot less stressful.

~PhysicsGal

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Pictures of Happiness

This week has been a rollercoaster of events and emotions, ranging from frustrated and angry to relaxed and happy. I'm going to focus on the happy things, because the frustrating things aren't going to go away anytime soon, except maybe my house will be quiet today if they can remove the last of the blowers/dehumidifiers that are kicking me out of my kitchen, making my house too loud to enjoy, and messing with the thermostats so some rooms are toasty warm and others are so cold there is condensation on the walls.

Anyway, happy thoughts.

As I mentioned in my last post, Dear Husband got his much belated birthday gift of a comfortable recliner, which he loves and Penny loves (and I love it too, but I have to wait to get my own).

This is the face of doggy comfort.


Tuesday, November 12, 2013

It was the best of days, it was the worst of days...

Yesterday was one of those days, and it kinda carried into today.

It started out with the Servepro guys ripping out even more of my shower, and intimating that my beautiful tile floor might need to be ripped up (bad). Then the plumber came and finally found the tiny, tiny leak that was probably the cause of this whole thing, including the destruction of the shower pan. It started to dry out immediately (good).

While they were destroying my shower, I worked on my next research project, and did the whole 11 page integral and sent it off to my PI to check over while I started on the next step, which is looking like it will take at least 30 pages (not counting scratch work) to complete. Believe it or not, that counts under the 'good' column. It took me months to learn how to do this kind of integral, and now that I did, I seem to be able to do them with just a little concentration. If only that were the hard part...

Then we found out that the recliner we had ordered for Dear Husband as a much belated birthday present was finally in to be picked up. So we made the trek out to the warehouse, and it turns out to be one of the best purchases we've ever made.  It is soft. It is like sitting on a cloud.

It put Dear Husband into the calmest, happiest mood I have ever seen. He was as close to zen as I think is possible for him. And just to complete his day, Penny finally shared his chair. Before, she would sleep in his arms, but not at his side. She preferred between me and the armrest for that. This is also the most zen Penny I've seen.

I will post photos seperately, as my phone has decided not to share pictures tonight.

To round everything out, I found the wool to make my Christmas stocking, and it was snowing earlier. Progression from "worst" to "best" complete.

~PhysicsGal


Sunday, November 10, 2013

Shower Saga, Part 2

The great shower disaster of 2013 continues. After removing the shower base, which helped a great deal, and ripping up my laundry room floor because the blowers blew the water under that floor too, it has been determined that in addition to the shower pan leaking, there is a leak in some weird pipe that we don't know what it connects to. It's a drain pipe, not a supply pipe, but it seems to be draining a wall, not anything visible, like a sink.

So we have a call into yet another plumber (courtesy of our warranty company) to come find/fix the precise leak so we can FINALLY move onto the repairing portion of our program. Its a little quieter upstairs because the blowers are behind closed doors, but still dry and annoying. The drying company is getting twitchy, though they are being paid so I don't know why.

The bright side of this today is that it spurred me to do ALL the laundry. And fold it. And iron it. And actually put it away. I can't actually put the sheets and towels away because there are blowers in front of the linen closet door, but they are ready to be put away as soon as I can open that door again. I usually stop somewhere around the folding step, and iron as needed.

I seriously hope that this thing can get to the 'hire contractors' stage, because I am beyond ready to be a construction zone, and not a disaster zone.

Saturday, November 9, 2013

Optics: Index Refraction: Eyeglasses

Eyeglasses are an example of the usefulness of refractive index that most people are familiar with. Although contact lenses are slowly making glasses less public and more the thing that gets you safely from the bathroom to the bed at night, everyone knows someone who wears glasses.

If it weren't for the index of refraction of materials being different, we couldn't make eyeglasses. This is because the difference in the index of refraction leads to a bending of light at the interface between materials, known as refraction. How much the light bends depends on the ratio of the two mismatched indices, and is encapsulated in a fundamental law of optics called Snell's Law*.

Snell's Law


This is useful because it allows us to make converging and diverging lenses. A converging lens is one that brings all incoming light to a tight focus; a magnifying lens is an example of a double converging lens, as any child who used one to light small fires can tell you. A diverging lens takes incoming light and spreads it out, rather than bringing to to a focus. This makes them useful for correcting short sightedness.

Friday, November 8, 2013

Optics: Refractive Index, Part 1

The refractive index of materials is one of the most obviously useful optical phenomena I can think of. We've been taking advantage of it for thousands of years, because that's how long we've used lens of some sort. The refractive index is why we have binoculars, telescopes, microscopes, eyeglasses, and why people who have really bad eye sight, like me, don't have to wear coke bottle lenses any more. Its what makes a straw in a glass of water look like its bent and that fish you are trying to catch ninja-style look elsewhere than it is. The fact that it is slightly different for different colors of light lets us use prisms to make rainbows.
High refractive index dispersive lens

So, what is this thing and how does it work?

Thursday, November 7, 2013

Shower Saga, Part 1

Technically, this should be part 2 with part one here, but I didn't want to go back and change the post. 

Our ceiling is still dripping (the grout in the shower pan is acting like a giant sponge, slowly releasing its water), so our house is still full of dehumidifiers and blowers, which are starting to make it very warm, because they have been running so long. We finally got the insurance adjuster to come, and the good news is they will cover everything but the shower. I did my best to argue for it, but in the end I think it will be ok because instead of sending work crews, they send a check that covers fair market price for all the work they agree needs doing, which in this case includes the cost of professionals completely repainting my downstairs ceiling. We just finished painting it, and a relatively small section was damaged, so once the dry-wall people fix the hole, I don't think it would be too terrible to just repaint that section myself, and put the money to a new shower. 

A friend at school was able to recommend a 'good and reasonable' tile guy through a friend of his father-in-law (sometimes I love the South. Everyone has Connections). He'll come and bust out our shower base on Sunday, and when we decide what to do with the shower replacement I'm 99% sure I'll go with him. Finally things are moving towards the repaired stage of things. 


While I definitely wish that this had NOT happened right now, I am looking on the bright side, and I am learning a lot. Hopefully we can keep moving slowly but surely on this, and get it resolved quickly. 

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Drip...Drip...Drip

Well, the situation has improved slightly. My house is as arid as a desert, and most of the areas that yesterday were soaking are dry.

But it's still dripping from my ceiling.



That's water, seeping through my kitchen ceiling right next to/above my fridge and stove. The shower pan is still leaking water, probably because they filled it with grout in some 80s bright idea, and then stuck little tiles on it. Grout is not water proof. It acts like a sponge. And it is now, having filled to the point it cracked and over-flowed, releasing it's water in a slow, torturous drip downstairs and a slow seeping upstairs.

The blowers and dehumidifiers are still in place to hold the seepage at bay and keep the water damage as contained as possible. The constant noise is getting on my nerves.

The only way to stop this is to remove the shower pan, which requires destroying at least the shower floor, which we can't do until the insurance adjustor comes.

Which means at least another day, and more like two, with all the noise and the dripping and not knowing when I'll be getting my kitchen back. Between all the sheetrock dust blowing around and the water dripping right where I make food I'm not comfortable cooking, so its take out for us.

I am trying to stay positive and calm. Hey, great excuse to install recessed lighting and replace the out-of-date shower! Calm and happy people are more likely to get what they want out of customer service rep types (at least in my experience). But being stuck waiting for all the parts to come together so we can get moving on repairing things is getting on my nerves.

Luckily, Penny is always there to make me and Dear husband smile. For example, reading the news of a morning on my notebook.

Because the cute dog should take up more digital and mental space than a drippy ceiling. 

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

My kitchen is missing its ceiling...

because the master bathroom's shower was poorly designed and now that it is 25 years old developed very small cracks in the grout which let water build up in the pan until it over-flowed and flooded my upstairs carpet and then my kitchen ceiling all in 48 horrible hours. 

It all started Saturday night as I was going to bed, and the carpet under a runner in the hall outside our bedroom door felt...squishy. Underneath, it was soaking wet. It was too late to call a plumber/the home warranty company, so I called as soon as I could Sunday morning. At this point there was just water in the upstair's carpet. I felt the kitchen ceiling--no signs of wetness/softness. Plumber diagnosed a problem with the shower basin, said we needed a restoration company/contractor,  not a plumber. So I called the insurance company, filed a claim, got the ball rolling to have an adjustor come out and assess the damage so a restoration company could take care of the (then seemingly minimal) damage.

All the water, as of Sunday night. 
 I left Monday morning, and everything seemed hunky-dory. The upstair's subflooring looked like it was drying, we weren't using the guilty shower, everything should be fine.

I came home to this
Approximately 3 ft in diameter, and has a tail that runs to the wall.
 and about two gallons of water on my floor, and a sodden kitchen island. I quickly mopped up the floor, got a bowl under the dripp, called the insurance company to tell them of the new development, the warranty company to send a new plumber, and after getting some help from a neighbor shut off the water supply to the house (it's out by the street. Never would have occurred to me to look there) tried to assess the damage. Ceiling squishy and wet. Upstairs no wetter.

Plumber came out, confirmed the first one's opinion, but with more detail. There are tiny, tiny cracks in the grout (which is not waterproof, I learned) which were letting water pool in the pan beneath, which had finally hit capacity and started to overflow. No way for us to know until it ran over.

Insurance company sent out water damage control people that evening to clean up and try to dry everything out. They started out trying to conserve as much as they could

 
 Ended up having to revise that plan when the dry wall just kept bending and collapsing.

That's a good 25-30% of my kitchen ceiling gone, and its still dripping/dusty.

Then they  set up a squadron of industrial blowers and dehumidifiers upstairs and down. 




There's another 2 that you can't see here.
 They are really loud, and they need to be going 24/7 until everything dries out. It sounds like a wind tunnel. Its pretty constant, which lets us sleep, but it is wearing, and Penny is terrified of them.

Dear Universe, when I said I wanted to redo the kitchen and the shower, I didn't mean right now.
 

Sunday, November 3, 2013

Setting the Table

I've been putting off posting this for a while. I've been putting off even writing it, because I feel unqualified to offer an opinion. A small side effect of grad school I suppose.

But I feel compelled to write this. God has put this on my heart and I can't shake it.

When did the church forget our calling? When did we decide it was ok to become dictators to/slaves of social norms? When did we stop being a church of outcasts and forgiven sinners, and become the church of the middle class and 'good' people? When did we decide that we were going to ignore our call to 'the least of these', the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the criminals and the untouchables? When did we decide that we were better than everyone else and could act so high and mighty?

I know there are lots of churches who run soup kitchens, homeless shelters, prison ministries. And these are good ministries which deserve to be applauded. They are doing good work.

But if a pregnant teenager walked into your church, would she be greeted the same way you would greet a family of 4? Would the homeless man in the dirty coat be offered a cup of coffee just like the guy in the $1000 suit? Do you tell your child to stand by the gay child at school, or do you tell him to stay away?

When did we forget that we are the same as them, except that we know we have been forgiven solely by the grace of God? Is the blood of Christ sufficient only for our lying, cheating, hating, murdering, lusting, idolatrous soul, but not theirs?

If you are yelling at anyone but other believers who have defiled the church, you are not demonstrating Christ's love to the world. Who does Jesus get angry at? The Jews who turned the temple into a market. Who does Jesus show compassion to? All the sinners the 'good' people hated. He protects an adulterous woman from being stoned. Just talks to the woman living with a man who is not her husband, and offers eternal life. Eats with the tax collectors and prostitutes.

If you say that you would never do something so horrible as that, whatever sin you find particularly abhorrent, remember that in the eyes of God, a sin is a sin. Full stop. No nice gradation. Hating someone is the same magnitude as killing them. Looking at someone with lust is the same as fornication. Every day, in word, thought and deed, we sin and fall short of the glory of God. Why should I be acceptable for only lusting, and the pregnant teenager be reviled for actually fornicating? Only because we can see her sin. Secret sins are ok, so long as we keep them secret. But that is an entirely human perspective, not one of God. God sees everything, and my sin is just as deadly as her's. But Christ's blood is sufficient for me, and it is sufficient for anyone else. The quality of mercy is not strained.

The church needs to stop yelling, and start setting the table. The first literally, the latter both literally and figuratively. We need to stop turning our backs on the people who have the most claim on us, for Christ's sake. We need to offer comfort, protection and love. Not hatred and signs and things to throw. What if instead of screaming at women going to abortion clinics, we offered a coffee, a listening ear, a different path?  Defended the teenager being bullied, for whatever reason? Stopped the drunks behind the bar from beating up a guy who looks different? Gave as much to Salvation Army to help save people and get them back on their feet as we did Starbucks for a cup of over roasted coffee with over priced milk and sugar?

What if we learned to eat with the tax collectors and prostitutes?

I think it would look a lot more the like the wedding feast of the Lamb than we like to admit.

Friday, November 1, 2013

Why the Sky is Blue

So today I finally return to the world of physics and optics posts with a classic question that gets asked by children to their parents and qualifying exam committees to their examinees alike*. Why is the sky blue?

The first part of the answer is fairly easy to find with a judicious Google search: Rayleigh scattering!

In optics, several types of scattering, classified by the size of the particle doing the scattering, whether the collision is elastic (the incoming photon leaves with the same energy it started with) or inelastic (it loses energy in the collision to the thing its colliding with). Rayleigh scattering, named after Lord Rayleigh who did a lot of work in optics near the end of the 19th century, is scattering that is elastic, and the scattering object is smaller than the wavelength of the incoming photons**. The degree to which the incoming light is scattered is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the wavelength. So a longer wavelength photon will be less scattered than a shorter wavelength photon.

Sunlight is broad spectrum thermal light. For this discussion, we only care about the visible portion of the spectrum, which is roughly evenly distributed in incoming intensity. Once the sun's light hits the earth's atmosphere, it will encounter diffuse gas in the upper layers. The wavelength of the light is on the order of 10-7  m, while the atoms it encounters have nuclei on the order of 10 -14 m, 10 million times smaller.
Not to scale
When the light strikes a nucleus, its component wavelengths get scattered according to the rules of Rayleigh scattering.


The red end of the light spectrum gets scattered in a roughly forward direction, while the blue/purple end of the spectrum gets scattered off to the side.  Most explanations end here, but that leaves most people wondering why the sky isn't purple.

The answer to that part of the question has nothing to do with Rayleigh scattering and everything to do with the human eye. As you can see in this link, the peak color sensitivity of the human eye is in the green (550 nm is green, 700 nm is red, 475 is blue). This is one reason why you don't see blue and purple laser pointers--our eyes don't pick them  up all that well. (Red laser pointers are the most popular because they are dirt cheap after cd players became consumer items, and because a poorly made green laser pointer emits UV laser light.) So when our eyes are presented with a little green, and a lot of blue and purple light, what we see is  blue tinged with green. If you don't believe there is green in it, go ask a painter to paint the sky for you and see if they don't include a dash of green. .

And that, my online friends, is why the sky is blue.

~PhysicsGal


*Yes, this was one of the questions in the oral portion of my qualifying exam.

**I will mention this very briefly for purposes of this post, and discuss it in greater length in a later post: light exhibits both particle-like and wave-like properties.  We can speak of photons (particle-like) being scattered elastically, but also of photons having a wavelength and frequency (wave-like).