~Tuesday~ In a rare occurrence, I woke up before my alarm went off, which was set for 7:30. That put me enough ahead of schedule for the bus, that I loaded my dishwasher to kill time.
I arrived at the city bus stop at 8:14, and the bus arrived at 8:23. The was a new driver, which is to say that that new enforcer driver wasn’t at the helm.
I surmised that the girl sitting across from me was either a “germaphobe” or was listening to something so suspenseful on her phone that it made her move to:
She sat like that the entire time she was on the bus.
At the Gorman and Conifer stop, a lady boarded who was absolutely screaming into her cell phone. Behind her, boarded an elderly white couple, which is virtually unheard of on the city bus.
Four people, including myself, exited at the Brooks and Hillsborough stop, and I like that all three of those in front of me said thank you to the driver as they exited… as did I. Such polite kids at that NC State University.
I had my weekly staff meeting with my boss, which didn’t take the whole hour and for which we were both grateful.
My boss actually talked about some of her past, which she has never done with me before. The conversation started with my expressing empathy for her drive back and forth to work every day, mentioning that I thought of her when passing the I-95 exit for Fayetteville—which she commutes from daily—on my way to and from Myrtle Beach this weekend. In talking about how she never thought she’d be doing that for so long, she recounted the many other places she lived before settling in Fayetteville.
I took a break from my workday at a little after 2:30 to walk across the street to the kind of event that you can only see working at a university. As a fun part of a Materials Engineering summer camp for high school juniors and seniors, an 80-pound ball of Silly Putty was thrown off the roof of the D.H. Hill Library at NC State University in Raleigh, N.C.
I really liked the set up to this, as one of the camp professors talked to the kids about the properties of the silicone polymer known as Silly Putty, and as a precursor to dropping the “big” ball, they dropped smaller balls—one about the size of a golf ball and another about the size of a softball. Both of those bounced really high back into the air and then bounced a couple of times away from the landing area.
After that, the professor said, “So what would you expect from the really big one?” Here are a series of photos, courtesy of Hannah Townsend, townsend@newsobserver.com (hover over images for captions):
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See six more of Hannah’s pictures of the event in the News & Observer’s Photo Gallery. And here’s a video of the event:
Over this past weekend, there was an event nearby in Hillsborough called the Wild Goose Festival, which I would have attended had I not been in Myrtle Beach. I liked a line from a posting about it so much that I posted this comment to it:
![Nice: '...a massive theological superstructure around [one's] beliefs.' I'm going to start referring to most organized religions as such.](http://pics.livejournal.com/dailyafirmation/pic/002fpzcx "Nice: '...a massive theological superstructure around [one's] beliefs.' I'm going to start referring to most organized religions as such.")
You can click on that image if you’re interested in reading the story referenced in the Facebook posting.
John was pretty much a dull boy this evening, spending three hours working on the minutes of the May UTIC meeting, which I have to send out at work tomorrow before the close of business.