Penny project

It’s a shame the penny project ended. It has amused me for two or three weeks, and kept Laura nimble as a goat. Twenty odd plastic cups holding solution and a penny to be cleaned needed to be set up and tended for a week. In our house, the kitchen or Laura’s desk were available, except…

The kitchen counters are for cooking. Leaving cups of solution invited spillage, toast crumbs, coffee inadvertently added by grandma, or bits of spinach and olive oil from Laura’s stir fry. Laura’s desk is a joke; there is more room on mine.

I suggested clearing an appropriate space in the front of the shed and be sure she got there in daylight to take pictures. So she did, even stepping over the lab apparatus, lawnmower held high, to deal with the grass last weekend.

The project required twenty household chemicals, plus a plein air control. Of the chemicals, exactly twenty five percent will never cross my/our threshold. Ketchup, hot sauce, cola, Pledge, bleach. Laura canvassed the neighborhood. “Can I have a bit of ketchup?...hot sauce?...a dab of furniture polish?”

After the initial set up, the project was rather humdrum, for the observer, at least. I knew it was being tended when Laura grabbed the shed key and sped out the back door at night, flashlight in the other hand.

The analysis and presentation have been fun. I did make a screen shot of her beginning and ending photos; the colors are nice and/or interesting. The entire affair was emptied on the kitchen counter, test data in careful order. Data previously input into google is downloaded. A google engineer would have been appreciated here, but she got on through.

My next computer will print to the printer on demand, without turning the printer off and on and waiting for its self test. It will print from Laura’s computer with or without getting up and finding the I/O. We closing in on new equipment, real fast.

Little more to say. Next the slicing and dicing, the pasting and gluing (Gorilla glue; the pennies will survive the bus ride to school!), and the obligatory display by the author.

Early credit bonus is 11/6. Done and done and done.