April, 2016

Obviously You're Unable To Assimilate My Stimulating Concepts Into Your Slighted And Monochrome World View.

When I was growing up, I used to daydream about how cool it would be to live in the same house as Patty Duke or the Nelsons. Even camping out at the Ponderosa (hello, Little Joe!) could be fun.

So why am I living in the middle of MacGyverland and in a sea of Mr. Wizard's failed experiment?

(Oh, well, could be worse—like Mythbusters.)

I was starting to go a little buggy, though. The kitchen was full or bottles and beakers of sugar solutions with dangling bits of string and rock candy in various stages of creation. That was the genesis of the science fair entry—what percentage solution worked best, did adding coloring and flavoring change the growth time and so forth. While the dozens of containers were working their magic in the kitchen, Lexi had decided to experiment with non-edible crystals as well. She had gone to town with ammonia, bluing and other chemicals and the back patio looked like a spelunker's dream. It started to remind me of the cover to Rick Wakeman's album Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

The freezer stated getting crowded, too. Lexi won a slushy mug at a birthday party and almost wore the thing out. Everything was up for grabs—soda pop, Kool-Aid, fruit juice, you name it. She was fascinated with the freezing starting from the outside and going in (and wasn't freaked out about Ducky's tales of hypothermia cases; she had a rep with the little boys in school as being impossible to gross out). The poor mug barely had a chance to work—she'd yank it out of the freezer every ten minutes to check on the progress.

I had my own freezing going on and was starting to get irritated. It was unseasonably hot as hell, and I had I jug of iced tea trying (Trying!) to freeze. ¾ frozen and you would have iced tea that was delightfully cold and wasn't getting watered down as it started to defrost. I finally put a kitchen timer on the door and limited her to once an hour checkups.

When my first jug of tea reached almost room temperature (close to 95) I swapped out for the semi-frozen one. I dumped in some turbinado sugar and set it aside to dissolve, Lexi was right behind me, nose inches away from the jug, staring at it fixedly.

"Do you mind?" I grumbled.

She took no offense. Heck, she took no notice. Instead she picked up the bottle and tipped it back and forth and set it back down.

"Hey!"

"Coooooooool…" she dragged out. She pointed to the icy sides. "It looks like the dementors are here… and the sugar looks like a snow globe!"

I bent over to her level and caught the last bits of sugar drifting down. My irritation melted away like the dissolving sugar. "Yeah. It does."

"We could put some of Uncle Tim's D&D figurines in—"

"No. NO."

"Oh. Okay." She pointed at the middle of the ragged circle. "And that weird clump of ice looks like the castle of an evil sorcerer."

"And up there—it's like a ghost tree." I pointed to the arching stalactites of ice.

Her eyes widened. "Cooooooool!"

Sometimes you just have to look at things a little differently to see them as they should be seen.