Pulling An All-Nighter
It’s been a long time since I have been in school – over 10 years, in fact. That didn’t stop me from having to pull an all-nighter on Wednesday to help my son finish his science fair project. I’m not sure how we arrived at that point, other than my wife being a procrastinator of legendary proportions. We started on the project in January. There was no school last week, so we could have finished everything then. None of that happened though.
When I say we, I mean my wife, my son, and myself. You can’t trust a sixth grader to get a project of that size completed on his own accord. It’s just not realistic unless the kid is some kind of super nerd. According to his abstract, he thought he “has seen holograms and thought hey, I could be a young person that could make one.” We obviously have our work cut out for us.
Over a month ago, we made a series of holograms to test out our experiment and get ready for the real thing. That revealed a two-fold problem. First, our idea of using temperature of the specimen as the control was shot because condensation was messing up our images. Second, the holograms don’t last forever. They started turning brown after a couple of weeks. This caused us to have to rework our premise, as well as delay the real experiments to try to maintain a good level of quality for the actual science fair.
To make a long story short, because let’s face it, no one gives a rip about my kid’s science fair, instead of using the week to get all of the poster boards assembled, it sat around. The experiments were done, so we had the results, but a lot of things needed to be assembled and placed on the board. Assembling the board that you see on the right took until midnight. Was it worth it? Nope. We didn’t win the science fair. I’m just hoping for an A at this point.
