Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Chemists do it explosively

Or do they do it on the Table Periodically..
Or with pipettes
Or in test tubes
Or do they just experiment

Whatever 'do it' means.
A chain of hardware stores claim to be the Do-it place. The kids always thought that was funny.

The title was a bumper sticker that could be purchased at one of the meetings I went to. I wonder how many were sold? I am guessing not many.

I am not one for bumper stickers. The only one I ever had was Finisher of the  Dexter-Ann Arbor Race. It was on my car until it died and it could not be transferred to the  new car. Even so, it was assumed by most that Steve was the finisher, not me. The Dexter-Ann Arbor race used to be 15 miles long but the first year I did it, they had shortened it to a half-marathon. Instead of running an additional 2 miles in the river valley, the race went up a steep half-mile to finish downtown, a hill anticipated with dread. The day before the race, my running partner and I drove the course though it was well familiar to me as this river valley is a popular place to bike. It seemed like a long, long way to run. My father grew up in Ann Arbor. At one point, he was forced to hike through this river valley as part of a Boy Scout activity. He viewed it as torture and when we were kids, he would drive on this road never failing to mention how awful that day was. The road is 9 miles long. To make the run  13.1 miles, they have you run west of Dexter for a mile and tack on another mile at the end.
So I was able to run it without stopping. Later, when I was training for marathons, I would use this same course as the miles were marked and it was shaded. I would run to Dexter, buy a Gatorade and run back.

Many bumper stickers are political statements. As Steve and I have very different views on politics, we could never agree on a particular statement, not that I would want to subject my car to possible vandalism. Same for religious stickers even the innocuous ones whose message is Why can't we all get along?
For some reason I see the bumper sticker M-22 around town. M-22 is a very pretty road up north but to put it on a bumper sticker?
 Another I see occasionally is Ithaca is Gorges.
Ithaca is a town near where I grew up in New York. Other towns nearby had gorges too such as Binghamton and Watkins Glen. They sort of blurred together in my memory. We used to go to a park that one had to walk down the sides of a gorge to access it. It had the same name as my last name so I do remember that correctly. There was a fancy slide with a sign on it that you had to be at least 8 to go go down it. I tried to go down it when I was much younger and I remember some matron, whose job apparently was to keep underaged kids off of it, pulled me off the ladder as I screamed. Once I was 7, I figured I would be big enough to fool the guardian of the slide. I also tried to speak as if I were 8, which I am sure missed the mark. But I finally got to go down that slide. By the time I was 8, I was living in Michigan. A few years ago, Steve, Naomi, and I drove through Ithaca on the way to NYC. It was not a fun drive as Steve was angry at me and giving me the silent treatment..not fun when you are stuck in a car with him. We did go through the gorges, which are pretty and then went to The Moosewood Cafe, which Steve and Naomi hated. I looked for the park with my same last name but could not find it. It turns out that it is in Binghamton. I also remembered Sapsucker Woods, a woodpecker preserve, but thought I subjected Steve to enough revisiting my history.

I hate this snow. Our one car is buried under a mountain of snow. I will go to the Y once Steve returns from work but I know the streets will be impossible to park along.

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