Cake pops

I had two cake pops today. When I woke up I didn't even know what that was. I also didn't know we got eight inches of snow last night (the first fall of more than four inches this year) until I walked out the door, already almost late.

With a couple other graduate students I'm co-teaching a basic ecology course. Today we talked about decomposition. Did you know that Archaea are the only organisms that create methane and they are only present in about half of humans' guts. That means that only half of us are emitting flammable flatulence.

Halfway down the ridge a Toyota Yaris tried to pass me on a curve. The tiny wedge shaped car became a wedge shaped fountain of powder as it crossed the piled snow on the dividing line. I thought for sure he was going off the road but he was able to slow down fast enough to barely make the turn. We waved at each other and he sped off.

I made it to class five minutes early but then I realized that the tiny netbook computer I'd bought from my Czech friend Vladen was powered down. With some 256 Mb of RAM it takes 15 minutes to load Windows XP. I hit the power button and started chatting with the students. Twenty minutes later I gave up and one of the students loaded my presentation on his laptop.

"What's Breaking Dawn?" Kevin asked after popping my flash drive in.
"Oh you know, just a story about a vampire and a human that love each other very much." I knew I should have emptied the trash after deleting that from the drive.

Tonight we shoveled the driveway. I scooped snow while Rachel pulled Ingrid behind in a sled, acting like a little compactor. Ingrid started with one leg hanging over the side of the sled. After ten minutes all four limbs and the back of her head were dangling and dragging as Rachel pulled her along.

The crazy thing is, the cake pops were from two totally unrelated people. One was the size of a golfball and chocolate, the other was the size of a big grape and berry flavored. They were good but I can't help but think that they'll never beat the real thing, or even cupcakes.