Dancing! Birthdays. Lessons from geography.

2021 10 17

We had a dance party a week ago Saturday at our house. Oksana loves to dance – she was a professional for a while – and encourage me to set it up. We invited people from Toastmasters – a lot of young people, quite a few of them single. I put together 12 sets of dance music including rock 'n' roll, swing, waltz, cha-cha, and Latin.

The party turned out to be only about 18 people. Some were sick with this or that – not Covid – and couldn't make it. The most popular dance seem to be cha-cha, probably because I had posted instruction on YouTube. We went through the instruction about three times. This is something in the Ukrainian character. They do like to learn, and properly. If and when we do it again, I expect more people will take time to practice in advance.

Instead of a sit-down meal, we had finger food this time. I found a recipe for lavash rolls– lavash is local version of pita bread.  The rolls included Ukrainian cottage cheese, eggplant and greens. Eddie made them, and they turned out to much more popular than my dolmas – stuffed grape leaves. The guests are generous as well. They brought a huge chocolate cake, lots of fruit and other things to eat. We just set the finger food on the kitchen table, leaving a maximum of space free for dancing.

Usually girls like to dance more than the guys, but this night the guys acquitted themselves pretty well. We should have had about ten more people. I expect that the next time we do this, word will have gotten out.

Eddie's 10th birthday was anticlimactic. He had gotten the two presents he wanted well ahead of time. First was a surprisingly inexpensive solar powered robot. I had been skeptical. As tiny as the motor was, the solar panel wasn't enough to power it. The second present was a seltzer bottle. He makes charged water regularly. We bought a bunch of syrups to go in the sparkling water. This has been a disappointment. The syrups in France are absolutely wonderful, crisp tastes. The ones here are just sweet and syrupy.

We had planned to go out for sushi for dinner, but Oksana and I both felt a little bit weak so we called it off. Babysitter Anna invited Eddie to spend the night in her apartment and they ordered out. Anna knows how to shop. She got two-for-one so they had sushi dinner for Eddie's birthday and we have the other one last night.  It is not quite the same as in Japan, but passable.

Eddie makes pretty good sushi himself. We have discovered a source for all of the ingredients including large packages of seaweed at a fair price.  Eddie has volunteered to make it the next time we have a party at our house. It will go over bigger than my dolmas.

Zoriana is insistent about being read to. She shoves about four books per night into my face. I was becoming suspicious, so I started to quiz her on how much she understood. I would ask, "How do you say that in Ukrainian?" She often couldn't tell me, so I turned around and used it as a teaching experience. There are some parts of the stories she could not even tell in Ukrainian, so I fell way back to explain the concept. I am blessed to have children who are eager to learn; my challenge is to figure out how best to teach.

Zoriana is an exuberant child. I have often remonstrated her about being a little rough with Marianna. However, the girls seem to have come for the most part to a happy middle ground. Zoriana is not quite as rambunctious, and Marianna doesn't cry as much anymore. The two of them had a wonderful half-hour playing this morning.

Both the percent vaccinated and rate of infection here are rising quickly. This has been noted in a great many countries of the world – Covid rates jump after the vaccination start. I don't have the statistics to answer whether or not it is occurring here mainly among the newly vaccinated. At any rate the level of panic seems to be quite subdued. People are still not giving me any crap about not wearing my mask on the bus and even a substantial portion of the riders on the Metro don't. We don't have lockdowns. We don't have vaccine passports or anything like that. Our life is normal.

The news is elsewhere.  In the United States it's Let's go Brandon.  Foundational Americans have finally had enough of the Covid mandates and being called deplorable racists. I'm not holding my breath, but it looks like things are turning around.

Eddie and I are reading the Smithsonian visual encyclopedia on geography. There they assert that there are 4500 minerals in the Earth's crust. A suspiciously round number. Also rather small.  I checked.

One Internet source said that there are 3000 minerals, others 4000 and 5400. The interesting thing was that they also claim 240 minerals in nature that never existed before the arrival of man, the results of activities such as mining.

Considering the number of entries on the periodic table – 92 elements – one would say that even if minerals consisted only of two elements apiece, there would be something on the order of 8,000 of them. Of course we know that most minerals involve more than two elements. So the number 4500 seemed pretty small.

Reflecting further, we know that there are all sorts of new compounds, which would be called minerals if they existed naturally, that have been invented for their electrical, optical, physical, and pharmaceutical properties. Such things as gallium arsenide and tin indium oxide in semi conductors. These materials were created in the lab and found to work pretty well and they are now in industrial production.

We can't immediately know the physical, optical, electrical and metabolic properties of new chemical compounds that we make. One must create them, lab test them, and then put them in use. Most of the thousands and thousands don't get thoroughly tested. There are going to be surprises.

That's with inorganic compounds – those without carbon. Carbon is unique in its ability to form chains of indeterminate length and various configurations by linking together. Just for example, octane, gasoline, with the single chemical formula C8H18, can be assembled 18 different ways as isomers, per this diagram:

The universe of organic compounds, even though it involves of fewer elements, is vastly larger than inorganic because of this infinite linking ability of carbon. These combinations absolutely cannot all be tested.

Researchers create a compound and test it to see if it's useful. For example, DES and thalidomide looked promising for preventing miscarriage and morning sickness. They were – but with disastrous side effects: cancer and limbless infants.

Many are developed for one purpose, and later found to have others.  Viagra was developed for heart disease, but today is widely used for something else. Rhymes with I were 'spectin was developed as an antiparasitic but is useful for Covid 19. Remdesivir was developed for Hepatitis C.  But since it is under patent, and they can make money from it, they are using it for Covid.  The only way to find out what the uses are, and what the downsides are, is by testing.

Which brings us to some that were not adequately tested. In fact, testing was discouraged. Glyphosate, or Roundup, was promoted because it is beneficial as a weed killer. Now, decades later, it is being (slowly) banned due to its danger to humans.

Several scientists contend that graphene oxide is being put into the Covid 19 vaccines. Snopes says not, claiming that it would be impossible because it is not among the manufacturers' lists of ingredients. And drug companies never lie. This raises the question – if true, what is there for? Other researchers have found other unexpected compounds having nothing to do with Covid, such as fluorescent molecules.  Do they want to put us under black light to confirm we have been jabbed?  And how much remains unknown about the stuff confirmed to be there?

These are the thoughts that come of tugging on the thread of this small object in Eddie's book. The minerals themselves are interesting. Pictures are pretty.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, were the men are strong (and most can dance), the women are as enticing as ever, and the children poke their heads up through average like mushrooms coming up in the lawn after a spring rain.  God bless 'em.