The shed was cold, but their interaction on the bench was warming him up. They were alone at the moment but they knew that they could be interrupted at any moment. He was excited but nervous with anticipation.
“This is my first time”, confided Taonga.
“I’ll help you through it”, responded Trillium, “I’m quite a veteran”, to which Taonga raised his eyebrows. “Wha? Canadians have to do something to stay warm, right?” She winked.
They had been talking about doing it for quite a while but this was their first opportunity.
She bent over in front of him and held on tight, bracing for his action. “Stick it in hard.”
Taonga groaned as he drove it in. “It’s so tight”, he observed.
“Here, I’ll loosen it and you push it in deeper”. With deft movements of her experienced fingers, Trillium made the opening wider and with a grunt Taonga was able to put it in all the way.
“That a way big boy”, said Trillium with a giggle, “now for the painful part.” She wrapped the long laces around the palm of her hand, pulled up with all her strength and tied up his left foot as tightly as she could.
“And now for the other one”, said Trillium, as she guided him into the opening of his right ice skate. Once he squeezed his foot into the tight opening, she again pulled the laces as tight as she could.
“Now try standing up”
He pushed himself up from the bench to standing on the black mats. His first time ever on ice skates. “Not so bad…I can do this”, he said with obviously false pride. He smiled as he wobbled along.
They made their way out the door, down the stairs and onto the rough ice at the edge of the Canal. Trillium held his hand, smiling from ear to ear watching her talented-at-all-sports boyfriend step slowly across the ice, reminding her of Bambi. They both pulled their toques over their ears, zipped up their jackets, put their mittens on their hands and set off for school.
“You have to glide across the ice, not waddle like a penguin”, she laughed.
“Sure, no problem”, he said, as he took a tentative glide across the ice. Unfortunately, his back skate slipped out from under him. He landed hard on him bum, pulling Trillium down on top of him.
“No, problem?!?”
“Okay, little problem”, he said with a smile.
With a little effort and Trillium’s help, Taonga made it to his feet rubbing his sore behind.
“This may take a while” said Trillium, suppressing a laugh. “Glad we left a lot of time to get to school, eh?”
Taonga grunted in agreement, determined not to let this crazy Canadian pastime get the best of him. He slid his left foot forward pushing off with his right, and then did the same with the other leg, and he was on his way.
Slowly but surely they made it down the world’s longest skating rink.
“You think we’ll have anyone show up?” Trillium asked.
“Can’t skate and talk at the same time.”
Trillium looked up to see if he was serious. He smiled back at her.
“I’m sure we’ll get a few…but last year the naturalist club had more members.”
“We should make it more fun this year and try to find some real solid causes to get behind.”
“Ya…saving that old campus oak tree was important but not big enough. This year we have to really make a difference to our community. Really…we should make it the world community.”
“What about the universe?” Trillium joked.
“No really, screw Think Globally, Act Locally…lets act globally. People don’t think big enough and so the big problems don’t get solved. Gandhi said to be the change you wish to see in the world…but our worlds too messed up for that…we need to make others change too.”
Trillium smiled. She loved when he became passionate about something. He was a born leader…he was so charismatic. She could believe that they could really change the world, saving species from extinction, the world from pollution, leading people to world peace….
Taonga met her gaze and went on, “I know I’m preaching to the choir….its just that everyday it becomes more and more apparent that I am a member of a species that is destroying this planet and I can’t sit idly by while that happe—whoaaaahhh” Taonga crashed to the ground on his side, this time letting go of Trillium so as to not bring her down too.
“Ughh, that one hurt…”, he said, while getting up. “Who came up with this stupid sport…people are not meant to move across the ice”, he said with a smirk on his face.
Hand in hand they skated towards the school to set up their booth at the Club’s Fair.
Question 4b) Calculate the concentration of H+ and OH- in pure water at 25C. Please note that the equilibrium constant for water at 25C is 1.0 x 10-14.
He took a drag of his cigarette then set it in the ashtray as he thought about the problem for a moment. Before classes had begun, Jimmy had bought all his text books and started reading. The class syllabus for Analytical Chemistry had been posted on the web and he was now three chapters ahead. Not surprising though since while his fellow students spent time partying, he spent all his time studying. He had no social life to speak of.
He was interrupted by a girl’s high pitched giggle and he looked up to see a curly brown haired girl in a tight pink and white striped polo shirt being thrown over some jock’s shoulders. A pint of beer was sloshing around in his hand.
“Come with me woman” he bellowed and began laughing. The girl was still giggling away.
“Put me down”, she said flirtingly.
“I’m gonna take you back to my place and have my way with you”, he roared so that the whole pub could hear and began walking towards the exit. He chugged down the last of his beer and set it loudly on a table.
“Oh, no”, she said in the falsetto voice of a maiden in distress. This caused their friends to drop their pool cues and laugh uproariously.
“Quiet wench”, he said and smacked her, not too gently, on the butt. “Oooohh”, she squealed.
As she was carried from the pub, the girl looked up from the back of her captor, smiled and winked at the patrons of the pub who were watching her retreat, and with a cute little finger wave to her friends she was gone.
The guy is probably here on some sports scholarship, thought Jimmy. Jimmy never really got into sports; he never had the time or the raw talent. Instead, his talents and time went into scholarly pursuits. He graduated high school at the top of his class and he was at this university on a full scholarship. Even more impressive was that he had skipped a grade and had started a year earlier than his age-cohort. He was now in his third year of a Chemistry degree. Chemistry still had the same attraction for him. Although he would never voice this aloud, he thought of chemistry as a form of magic, with chemical reactions as the spells and potions, and becoming a chemist would be like becoming a mage. Pretty geeky, he knew, but successful people were oft times geeks.
For some reason he loved to do his studies in the pub. The white noise, caused by loud music and people chatting about life, love and studies centred his concentration on his task. He liked that it was dimly lit and of course it also gave him a place to smoke. It also gave him the chance to watch people carrying on their lives. One of his elective courses last year was a Sociology course and it had made him think that studying social interaction in a pub would be a really interesting research project.
Creasing the page of the thick textbook, he reread the question and put down the calculator that he’d been holding. He could do this calculation in his head. In his black note book he wrote:
H20 ↔ H+ + OH-
Kw = 1.0 x 10-14 = [H+] [OH-] = [x][x]
x = 1.0 x 10-7
Therefore the concentrations H+ and OH- in pure water at 25C are both 1.0 x 10-7
He checked his watch, 10:27am, he should be on his way. He closed his textbook and his ringed notebook and placed them in his satchel book bag. He took one last drag of his cigarette and butted out. Putting his bag over his neck and onto his shoulder, he left the dim light of the pub to the bright lights of the buildings lobby.
In front of him, snaking around the whole lobby were booths of all the different university clubs. He had no interest in joining a club but he knew that potential employers looked for well rounded individuals when hiring. He realized that he did not meet that description but he could use a club membership to create that illusion.
Wandering from booth to booth, trying to find something interesting. The only one that caught his eye was the Environmental Club. At the booth sat a good looking blonde and dark skinned jock. If it had been just the jock sitting at the table he would have walked right by but something about the blonde, with her hair split into two braids, and her beautiful green eyes, caught his attention. It was not even her beauty, it was the vibe she was giving off.
“Hi”, she said, “are you interested in joining our Environment Club? If so you just have to sign up here with your name, email address, and a screen name for the chat room we are setting up for the club.” He looked at her in confusion when she mentioned the screen name so she added, “You can choose anything…I use Trillium and Taonga is going to use Whenua.”
“K…” He was really nervous and could not form a full sentence. He did, however, know which name to pick. His only real social activity he took part in were Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and for the last three years he had been playing a dark mage. Jimmy took the pad and wrote in his name, email address and for his screen name he chose the name of the mage, Staedlin.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
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