You may have noticed (and probably not cared) but I’ve been busy lately. Most recently I was asked to provide a science demonstration for the VBS wrap-up party at church (yes, we did Power Lab this year). I think it was because I was free. I mean, doesn’t everyone have their own homebuilt trebuchet and hovercraft? I left my acetone behind which disappointed my son since we ran long (the kids loved the vortex generator) and didn’t get to set anything on fire. He was forced to use denatured alcohol instead. Ah, the sacrifices we are forced to endure.
I got off to a rocky start when I was asked to announce seconds were available just as I was about to begin. I had gone over everything in my head but somehow making an announcement wasn’t something I foresaw and it just put me off my opening patter. And then when the paper wouldn’t stay lit in the bottle that I was trying to suck an egg into, the wheels really came off the wagon. When I did get the egg in, there was so much wet paper (note – don’t let the wife wash out the bottle before sucking an egg into it) paper wrapped around it that it wouldn’t come out by blowing back into the bottle – it wouldn’t seal. I am glad I tried crushing soda cans at home before hand since all I was able to do was suck water up into them so I was spared the embarrassment of a demonstration that didn’t work at all. Oh well, once I moved on from the egg everything else worked really well except my time management so people actually thanked me for a great show. If only they knew how well it had gone in my head before hand!
Note to anyone else asked to put on science experiments for kids under 10 – don’t talk, just play the theme from Mission Impossible while performing the experiments. Children of that age don’t listen to the explanations and you wind up not doing some things when you run long.
