Class of 1990 Week 21

It was a week of getting assigned a lot of homework and struggling to get any of it done. I really missed my typewriter. I made some progress on newspaper stories, and working on my book case. There were a few significant things that happened of note.

Mom and Dad went to Winnipeg for the day. Mondays were always Dad's day off. Occasionally they would head north. The bummer was that the planetarium in Winnipeg was always closed on Monday's. While they were gone our cat Neko got into a fight. It was really loud and I called him a few times. When he finally came I took him in the back bathroom to check him out. He had blood drops all over him but they seemed to be from the stray that wondered into his turf. I didn’t find any wounds but his claws were splintered and bloody. After I cleaned him up I sat on the floor in the back hall and held him. He purred and because we never cleaned his teeth, after a few minutes he started to drool profusely, so I put him back outside.

Friday in Physics I got Peter and Kevin as lab partners. We were doing an experiment on the specific heat of metals: The exact project that I had taken to the state science fair two years before. I gave the directions, Peter took measurements, and Kevin did the math. We finished way ahead of every other group and spent the rest of the hour amusing ourselves by tossing ice into boiling water and watching the rapid melt. It was quite captivating, about as cool to watch as a lava lamp. We joked about setting up a Bunsen burner and beaker and melting ice that way as a conversation piece at a party. It was the most fun I had ever had in a science class in high school.

Mrs. Kappel and I had a talk after one of her classes. The volleyball team had one pep rally a year. It was before the last home game of the season and it was an all school pep rally that included the grade school. A major part of it was the acknowledging of each player and manager with a funny, sometimes slightly insulting prize based on inside jokes, personality quirks and incidents that happened during the year. (Why yes this is the inspiration behind the Walther Library Mandatory Student Staff Appreciation Meetings) I was a stat for five years starting in the eighth grade, and on more than one occasion she would use the pep rally to make fun of my difficulty with spelling. The year before she started her little shpeal about me with the words, “We all know that Ruth can’t spell…” Perhaps before she said that there may have been some first graders unaware of my learning disability, but her presentation solved that. It really bothered me. So knowing that it was coming up, I approached her after class one day and told her, in no uncertain terms, that if she made a public joke about my lack of spelling skills at the pep rally I would quit then and there and have nothing more to do with volleyball for the remainder of the season.

That weekend Sarah and Bob came and brought my typewriter with them. It still wasn’t quite right. Sunday it started to really snow. I shoveled the sidewalk and then had to clean it again two hours later. I enjoyed watching San Francisco beat Denver 55-10. Terry had made several bets against the 49ers. I noted that he was going to be "a bit sore in the pocket book come Monday."

REG

lhg edited and approved