Liquid bluing

Yowza, this has been a busy, busy summer, and I'm way behind on blogging. I have much to write about, but will begin with the most current event: E and I are growing a salt garden.

When I was 12, I had a homework assignment to design and carry out my own science experiment. In browsing books for ideas, I came across instructions for a salt garden, with a recipe for a liquid concoction that, when spooned over cut-up sponges, would bloom into puffs of salt crystals. The recipe called specifically for non-iodized salt. Since most readily-available table salt by then was iodized, a person really had to go out of his or her way to find the non-iodized variety, so I assumed there was a reason the recipe called for it. My experiment involved growing two salt gardens--one iodized and one non-iodized--whereby I discovered that non-iodized salt made no difference except for the challenge of finding a supermarket that carried it.

The even bigger challenge of that experiment involved obtaining another vital ingredient: liquid bluing. Liquid bluing is a colloidal suspension of blue iron powder (ferric hexacyanoferrate) in water, and it was already a rarity in 1979. When I finally tracked some down at a tiny, dimly lit, locally-owned grocery store across town, I became a hoarder: I needed a mere four tablespoons, but I bought two 8-oz. bottles, figuring I might never again have access to this relic of olden-days laundry whitening.

Over the intervening 33 years, every time I moved, I took my two precious bottles of liquid bluing with me, from Urbana to Tucson to Corvallis to Madison to Lawrence and finally to Durham. In Durham, the bottles remained undisturbed for twelve years in a plastic bag in a storage cabinet, until, during a recent cleaning frenzy, I rediscovered them and decided I had guarded them carefully for long enough. It was time to play.

E and I accumulated the other ingredients and on Sunday afternoon, we mixed everything together and started our garden.

Here's what it looked like on Sunday:

And here's what it looked like this morning:

Notice the crystals hanging over the edge of the bowl. They completed their escape this afternoon, and I expect to find them making their way off the countertop later this week.

Happily, we still have nearly two bottles of bluing left, so E can share this experience with his own kid(s) 33 years from now (by which time he will also be conducting an experiment on the stability of ferric hexacyanoferrate suspensions).

Here's the recipe:

4 T salt
4 T liquid bluing
4 T H2O
1 T ammonia

Mix together and distribute over cut up pieces of sponge. For colored crystals, dribble drops of food coloring on the sponges before adding the salt solution.

Kitty hygiene and recreation

I was welcomed home from Germany by two happy and precocious cats. What did they do while I was gone? I suspect our house-sitter had a word or two with Schroeder about HYGIENE. I have previously blogged about our attempts to toilet train Homer. New kitty Schroeder has no problems using the litter box, but in my absence he has learned both to clean himself in the shower...

...and to brush his teeth.

Thanks Janet!

Incidentally, Homer and Schroeder's shaggy, tick-infested, gruff but tender-hearted Bavarian cousin, Döpferl, also has, like Schroeder, a fetish for stuffies. His is a larger-than-life cardinal rather than a carrot. While Schroeder's goal is mainly to play fetch, Döpferl's is to kill.

A blogger abroad

An annual combination of business and pleasure brings us once again to Germany and my old blog stomping grounds: wadlstrumpf.blogspot.com.

Wrong vs. right

Fused chicklet-kabobs: WRONG. Wearing safety goggles when you futilely attempt to dremel kabobs apart: RIGHT. Thinking even your wife's ruined work is too good for the landfill: CHARMING.
 

Avoiding kabob membership in the first place: RIGHT.

Chickodils

One of my favorite poems is "Daffodils" by William Wordsworth. In a fatigued but heady moment, after staying up late at Claymakers inhaling kiln-room fumes, glazing chicklets, and sending the first mini-whistle flock into the kiln, I pillaged Wordsworth's rhyme scheme, yielding the poem below. The poetry gods exacted vengeance by striking down the flock: I had hung the birds on a bead rack (two ceramic posts across which multiple high-temperature metal bars rest) that supposedly could handle a cone-6 firing, and every bar sagged and fell off the posts. The result? Fused chicklet-kabobs. The resilient poet has yet to engineer a bulk (i.e. full flock vs. individual bird) firing solution, but in the meantime, I offer the poem publicly to let Euterpe and her sisters know I will not be deterred. (Not that, you know, I'm dropping the gauntlet or anything; I would never diss a Muse.)

Chickodils

I wondered to myself out loud,
How that same self to entertain,
When all at once I thought: a crowd:
A flock of birds to play a strain
With notes chromatic, diatonic,
Up scale, down scale, enharmonic.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle o’er the fruited plain,
I threw a flock in one long line,
For weeks the focus of my brain.
Three dozen made I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

Their fipples are a pain to make,
But when they resonate—what glee!
A potter could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company.
I made—and made—but little thought
What wealth the flock to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
I play a bird! Notes low and high
Bring music to my solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure quickens,
and dances to the well-tuned chickens.

Chicklets

Earlier this week, E found a plain little whistle I had made for a public school workshop. He suggested it would be nice to have a similar whistle, but with a hole for a piece of string so he could hang it around his neck. Thus was born the mini-chickarina: four holes, major sixth span (do re mi fa fi sol si la), and so cute, they make their larger counterparts look downright classy by comparison. See http://cuteoverload.com/tag/the-rules-of-cuteness/, Rules of Cuteness #s 3, 6, 7, 9, 14, 21, 28, 37, and 38.

Family portrait

Contemplating the origins of life

The serious artist in me--the one who skillfully crafts forms of elegance and beauty--is a little concerned that all I want to make these days is chicken-shaped ocarinas; but the practical geek in me laughs and says this is the clear confluence of a PhD in music theory, years of practice on the pottery wheel, and a lifetime of cat ownership.

All new correspondances with the Tooth Fairy

5/18/2012

Dear E,

Goodness, another one! Sorry for the delay; our sensors are good at detecting freshly-lost teeth under pillows, but not so good at detecting older ones. How long have you been holding onto this one? Clearly you did not want to part with it, but of course I’ll leave it here for you to keep, as always, along with these coins. Such a small container to fit everything in!

I saw on my way in that you’ve built a cardboard canon. My fruit bat says you could put an eye out with that, but I’m confident you’ll be careful. Unlike teeth, you know you only get two eyeballs TOTAL during your whole life. Did you know that when all of your adult teeth are in, you will have 32 of them? Not to mention your 20 deciduous teeth. That’s 52 in all! A year’s worth of weeks! A deck of cards! Can you think of other well-known 52s? (Hint: count the keys on your piano—the ones that are named after elephant teeth. And think about letters from a to Z…)

Keep on brushing! And floss a little more often, OK?
Love, as always,
TTF

P.S. By the way, do you know what deciduous means? Look it up. And while you’re at it, look up desiccated, since that’s what this particular tooth is, and why it took so long for it to show up on our radar.