Sunday afternoons are generally reserved for quiet reflection on the state of our souls. The childrens' souls are generally in a state of needing to go outside and use up all that excess energy, which they did with remarkable success today, only needing to be tossed out again two or three times for violating the No-Noise Zoning Laws. Cheryl contemplated the some cross-stitch and some Bible study workbooks and some Harry Potter (I lost count of how many times she's read the books...) while watching the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice (one of our absolute favorites) and may even have reviewed the interior surface of her eyelids for a short while, whilst I was busily involved in making copies of a design document for Adam's Tuesday afternoon Lego Mindstorms Club.
In the course of the day, the basement was completely ignored.
After a mind-numbing two hours of scanning the documents (there were over a hundred pages), which was only possible due to the pleasant distraction of P&P and the also-pleasant distraction of laughing and commenting at all of our favorite spots in the series, it was discovered that Deborah was in dire need of a trip to the clothing store for some new outfits, so Mom and Deb departed on their mission while the rest of us stayed behind to snack on popcorn and other idle pursuits. It was a gloriously restful afternoon, which would've been perfect but for the slight discomfort of an ongoing headache and a slight nausea which grew worse in the evening.
No doubt it was a punishment for my complete lack of basemental ambition.
At length I returned to my earlier and most rewarding task of reviewing my acquaintance with the fundamental concepts of transistor electronics by designing, constructing and testing a set of astable multivibrator circuits for the purpose of training future electrical engineers. One of the components with which I had been constructing the baseboard the other day was discovered to be malfunctioning; that is, one of the transistors was shot. Having quite a supply of them on hand, the offending part was speedily replaced and full functionality was restored, and my heart was glad of it. It's always pleasing to have achieved some measure of success or accomplishment, even one so insignificant and small.
Tomorrow I hope to expand on the circuit to incorporate both capacitors and coils in order to illustrate the concepts of integral and differential calculus.
It reminds me of the great difficulty with which the concept of calculus was grasped by this feeble brain. Indeed, it wasn't until my third year in college that it even began to make sense, and then only when it was presented not as a set of theoretical exercises of infinities of series and summations, but rather as the source for the formulas I had learned years before while going through my father's correspondence course in electronics! Now I could see why the capacitor and the inductor operated in the way that they do! Now I could see clearly how to interpret the complicated schematic diagrams which were no more than a set of obvious building blocks connected by trivial filtering circuits!
Oh, yes, and there will be work to do as well, the work for which I receive monetary compensation. Not much in the way of personal satisfaction these days, but one can't expect to enjoy oneself all the time in those sorts of things. It is the natural course of things that when the budget gets tight and the manpower list grows short, those of us who are left will be forced to do double-duty (or triple or quatro). It doesn't bother me as much as it once did; after all, it is not a matter of life or death, merely a matter of income. And if one looks hard, one can find something of redemptive value in the work-a-day experience; there are wonderful people with which to fellowship, and there are computers on which to play, and there is the eventual arrival of that most blessed moment when the internal alarm says, Go Home, to Hearth and Wife and Kin.
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