When the family came up for the sad time, Max got to stay with us for a couple of days. The weather was fairly gicky, so most of our fun had to be inside.
We played games. We like cards, but mancala is cool too – especially our game, that has tiny clear plastic animals for tokens – like you’re playing with emeralds and diamonds and rubies carved into Scottie dogs and deer and elephants. You may ask, looking at this shot – even what I am asking: why do I look so weird? Like I’ve got my shirt on backward or something.
And then the science fun began. First, Aunt Chaz, with her brilliant birthday intuition, had found ex-actly the right present. So, “Max…
close your eyes!!”
And, AHA! A real, honest-to-gosh scientist approved LAB COAT. Not only that –
but it was MONOGRAMMED. So Max now has creds.
We immediately began experiments. This one had a creative bent to it – after using baking soda, dye and some acid, we came up with these basic colors, which we spent a long time mixing in a small egg-dish sort of a mixing tray. Turquoise, it appears, is our favorite color.
Enjoying a moment of translucence.
See the egg tray? We graduated: working directly with the test tubes. How much red does it actually take to turn blue brown??
And we had fun with these. They started out as tiny little rock-hard marbles, about the size of the head of a pin: more of our exciting super-absorbant polyacrylamide tricks. It took a couple of hours in water for these to grow several hundred times their original size, and they end up being satisfyingly squishy. Also translucent.
We also made polyacrylic snow – a slightly different molecular structure, shaved into tiny flakes. The second you add water to the white dust, it puffs up into a credible mass of snow. But it didn’t pack at all, much to our disappointment. A third form of this stuff is the same substance used in disposable diapers – when liquid is introduced to that very fine white dust, it turns into a solid gel. Probably for eternity. No. No, it wouldn’t. Eventually, the liquid evaporates and only the dust is left. Still, I think diapers would be much more fun if they were filled with these colorful marbles. Maybe.
And that’s Mad scientist Gram and Max the Science Guy, signing off!
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