100th posting

Do I get a prize for a 100 posts, or a smack on the head for spending so much time on this? :*) Anyway, some of the local TV stations show weather pictures that you submit (they have shown 2 of mine in the past), so I submitted the 3 pix that I posted in the previous blog. They have shown at least 2 of the 3 so far. In other news, this past week January Interim at Bradley University has finished and the Spring Semester has begun. It promises to be busy and a schedule challenge for all 3 of us. Yesterday we had a Family Science Day event at a local preschool where Kris used to attend and Karen used to work. It takes a lot of time and effort to set up, run, and take down a demo event, but it went well! The picture is of me showing a child how adding some kinds of salt to water will make the water cold (e.g. ammonium nitrate) or hot (e.g. calcium chloride).

The birthdays of my dad, mother in law and sister in law are this weekend. This is a banner year for big birthdays: Kris turned 10 (is there a "genarian" word for that?), my dad just became a sexagenarian, and I become a quadragenarian in August. For those of you with an interest in Scotland, tonight is Burns Night, though I do not plan to attend a Burns supper this year or eat haggis. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burns_supper. Also, for those of you that have an interest in China and other countries in that area, tomorrow is the Chinese New Year, see: http://mandarin.about.com/od/chineseculture/a/newyear.htm. Xīn nián kuài lè to all!