scientific opinion

'fraid I don't have much to say. I'm kinda disappointed I got bumped out of a class that gave priority to students in a different master program. It was one of the German classes I was in too, so now I'm down to just two in German. How am I supposed to learn German if my strategy for cheap language lessons keeps running into road blocks? My nanny schedule is just prohibitive enough to make almost nothing else work, not to mention now I'd be entering a class three weeks late. Grrr.

Another point I feel rather grrr-ish about: I hurt my knee early last week, and running isn't working out too well as a result. 1/2 Marathon is a week from today.

grr.

On the more positive side, however, a lady I know from the bus invited me today to maybe play tennis with her sometime. I told her I've only tried one time, but would be happy to learn if she doesn't mind teaching me. We'll see if it works out. She's been saying for AGES she'd like to have me over for tea. We do have a date for that now, but she is quite busy and tired as a single mom, and she spends a lot of time helping her mom too. But tennis. Could be fun, huh? Yay for friends. And especially yay for friends who aren't friends with any of my other friends.

Back to work tomorrow! Think it's too much to hope that the potty training endeavor will be successfully completed? Probably so, I guess. I think I drove the little girl nuts last week; I asked her every ten minutes or so if she had to go. She probably thought, "Gosh woman! leave me alone already!" But ya know. It's my first time potty training!

And speaking of such things (children being kind of needy and endearing-if-gross in that neediness) you know how much I hate it if people don't wash their hands thoroughly. For a while I made a big deal about telling the girls they needed to wash "with SOAP!" and I smell their hands to verify. But, perhaps not surprisingly, I soon noticed that their hands, although smelling nicely of soap, were not the least bit damp afterward, and coincidently, I also wasn't hearing any water running in the next room. (I questioned M1 about that, and she said she'd just dried her hands "so well." uh huuuh.)

I've wizened up and now insist they have to use water too. But we were sitting at lunch the other day and M1 was sticking her fingers in her mouth. That's not good anyway, but particularly because M2 was sick, I told her to take her fingers out of her mouth, and asked them if they know why we don't stick our fingers in our eyes/noses/mouths, and why we need to wash our hands. They said no. I did my best to explain about micro-organisms, pathogenic medicine, Koch's Postulates--in short, why you are more likely to get sick if you do that. When I'd finished, M1 wrinkled her nose in clear disbelief, looked at M2 and said, "EHH?? THAT's weird!" M2 affirmed that opinion, stuck her fingers in her mouth to drive the point home, and just like that--Germ theory was discredited by a five year old.