Fighting entropy

"One of the ideas involved in the concept of entropy is that nature tends from order to disorder in isolated systems."

Isolated system? Check.

Order to disorder? Check.

Sound familiar?

How about this? "Inertia is the resistance of any physical object to a change in its state of motion or rest, or the tendency of an object to resist any change in its motion."

Inertia is almost the only concept I remember from my ninth-grade physics class. We spent most of our time watching videos or doing labs, and if a student approached the teacher with a question, she'd say, What does your book say? Which, I can understand promoting independent learning and all, but shouldn't a teacher teach?

My teacher, incidentally, had a very memorable appearance. If I talked to anyone who went to my junior high, and I was trying to remember the name of this teacher, it would go like this:

"My ninth-grade science teacher was . . . . oh, what was her name?"

. . . "The one who looked like a horse?"

"Yes."

And everyone would be satisfied. I know because this conversation has actually happened before.

But I digress. I've been thinking about the principle of inertia and the way it applies to my life. Here's an illustration: In March I was working on a big editing assignment. All my free time was gone. I'd put the kids down for a nap and work. I'd put the kids to bed and I'd work. I'd get up at five and work for two solid satisfying hours before they got up. And yet, during all this intensive mental concentration, all my work got done. The house was clean. I cooked dinner every night. I was an accomplishing machine.

Until the day I turned my work in. My free time was back, and I enjoyed it. We celebrated that night with pizza. And we ended up eating out two or three nights in a row.

Inertia.

The more I exercise, the more I want to exercise. The more healthfully I eat, the more I crave healthful food. The more I cook, the more ideas I have of things I want to cook. The more I read my scriptures, the better I feel and want to read my scriptures. I work and work and work and build up momentum to do the things that make me feel good. As long as I keep doing them, well and good.

But take a day off? The inertia crashes to zero and I have to jumpstart the whole system again. And when my inertia force is at zero, my house, the kids, and everything begins its helter-skelter crash back into disorder.

Inertia and entropy. Grr.

Don't let me leave you out...

I made my family blog private. So if you didn't get an invite, make sure I have your email.

Parenting Philosophy

I'm in the process of opening a new email, and cleaning out the old ones. It's been fun to see the archive of old emails. Silly chatter with old friends, reminders of things I used to do. And there were a couple of links I'd sent myself before I had kids. So here's the articles, from NPR.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19212514&sc=emaf

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=76838288&sc=emaf

Them's things I'll have to keep in mind.

Playing carpenter

My knees hurt. And they've got several kinds of bruises on them. Crawling around on concrete isn't very forgiving.

But it's so satisfying.

The only good place in my house to store the junk of living and having kids is in my crawlspace. And until last week it was a mishmash of boxes that was a blight in my psyche. So I decided to build some shelves. I was so committed I even drove the truck myself to get the 2x4s.

Side note: I'm an extremely nervous stick-shift driver. It gets worse when I have an audience, and so I've only driven our truck, which we've owned five years, a few times.

Now my crawlspace is a thing of beauty. I even vacuumed all the dead bugs and spider egg sacs so I could stand to be down there. And when I was done, I threw away the nearly-empty vacuum bag away. I couldn't stand the thought of those spider eggs hatching and tiny baby spiders coming crawling out of my vacuum. It gives me the shudders.