news flash

I interrupt nothing to bring you the late breaking news from the fourth grade science fair:

I won, I won, ahem, I mean, she won, sort of. Ellie's project was one of the five best in her class and eligible to compete in the school fair. I left her this morning setting up her board in the lunch room and waiting for the judges to come talk to her about her experiments for eligibility to compete in the district fair. She's not nervous, she rehearsed her speech, but I don't think it will go very much farther from here. Our little project, while visually appealing, is not the class of the competition. It would be unfair if her project was selected to move up to the district level because those other parents did a much better job than I did.

And this whole project helped me remember my own fifth grade science fair experience where my mom's project, er, my project, went to the state level (UofU Olpin Union Building, I still get a huge nostalgic rush everytime I walk in there). I was a big winner, but measured by today's safety standards, oh good hell, a complete biohazard. Mom went to the local hospital and asked a lab technician for the outdated bottles of the stuff they used to type and test blood and, I kid you not, I used darning needles (straight from a little dish of rubbing alcohol, sterile, sure, but by the time I went to the district fair, the damn things were rusty) to poke people in the finger so I could squeeze out some blood on a glass slide and type it. I kid you not, people let me poke their fingers with rusty darning needles. Can you even imagine? And the sad thing, I cannot for the life of me ever remember my own blood type, B something, not the one that is rare, the common one. My dabble in the dark arts stuck with me great huh?

Stay tuned for more news from the fourth grade science fair exclusively on this blog station.