Posts Tagged ‘normal’
We’re Not Like Other Families
Every family has its points of pride . . . some are the most active members at their churches. Some families are the wealthiest on the block, or in the town. Some families are politically or socially connected. My family is none of those things.
We can start with the fact that we are geeky . . . and proud of it. My little brother at age two would dunk his basketball and yell out any of a variety of great phrases “Rim shot!” “Nothin’ but net” “He shoots, he scores!” but he could also name every dinosaur ever known to man – including a full range of therapods. And you did not want to get into an argument with that kid. You would lose.
So I thought I would share some fun notes from my family.
When my kids were little and asked about something electrical, my Dad would always wind up asking them if something was an insulator or a conductor. My favorite moment came when my three year old son looked at Grampa with an ‘are you crazy?’ look on his face. But rather than telling Grampa that he was three and what did he know? he said “It’s a conductor, Grampa. Everyone knows that.” (They have since moved on to capacitance.)
The idea for my first book – Resonance – was sparked when my father handed me a photocopied journal paper on Polar Reversal Theories. At the dinner table.
How I learned to love the bomb – part 3
There are all kinds of things strange in Oak Ridge. In fact I would argue that something usual would be odd there. We even managed to make the normal, well, strange.
The old timers in our town don’t tell about the time before the land around the city was all subdivisions. No, these guys tell about the time before we understood about mercury poisoning.
The labs still remain in Oak Ridge, and they still do top secret government work, just as they have since they were built. In one of these labs, the old timers say they used to have pools of mercury. About 3 feet deep! And ‘in the days before we understood about inhaling it and getting it on our skin, we would just pull on our waders and go in.’ It seems they were just a bunch of good old boys, in back woods Tennessee, getting in their gear and their waders and going in to catch . . . strange diseases?
Every summer the local lake would get the public swim area shut down due to toxic levels of mercury. Us kids didn’t think anything of it. Isn’t mercury poisoning why any public swim area would be shut down?
