Word Pictures
Monday, April 2, 2007
The day began quite cool.
Back at the house, Collette and Rose worked on stimulating Rose’s memory with word pictures in the last two weeks of preparation for her big exam. As they started out the first study session, Carrie spoke darkly of work while eating quiche and Swiss cheese at the counter.
“What am I doing?” She suddenly asked herself, realizing that she had been eating a continuous stream of quiche and cheese for breakfast. “I think I’ll go cut me some bangs.”
She returned shortly later with a crop of blond over her forehead and left not much later for work, still speaking of the never-ending sinister dealings with customers. That would equivocate customer service, sadly. The world was a nasty place.
Meanwhile Joe was at the Green Lantern, returned to study for the ACT, went out jogging, and came back to lift weights.
During the study session that morning, Rose brought out her aquarium to keep an eye on frog and toad. Toad had become more active since the previous afternoon.
“Quit watching me,” Rose told him several times.
His beady eyes popped at her silently.
“He wants to have a staring contest,” she said, getting up from the counter and moving toward the pantry.
“No snacks, Rose,” Collette caught her. “Dad said so. You never eat your meals.”
Rose pouted and kept trying to steal cookies for the next hour. But she was side-tracked enough with the toad to forget them from time to time.
“I’ve called him Buddha,” she pointed at Toad sitting smugly in the water. “He has a big old beer belly. I wonder what he ate before I caught him.”
“Who knows…” Collette was busy marking off psychology questions for Rose.
Rose sighed. “You’re my best friend, Toad.”
Meanwhile, the word pictures Rose created for herself for psychology during the day, were truly stunning. While attempting to remember that Meyer Freidman and Ron Rosenman both studied Type A personalities and a Mr. Dahlstrom connected heart disease to Type A personalities, Rose came up with the following concoction:
Meyer and Ron were both competitive people who fried (Freidman) a man (Rosenman) and ate him in a sandwich; then they got heart disease from eating the sandwich. Then a doll (Dahl) ran up strumming (strom) a ukulele and told them “I told you so”. Amazingly, the more bizarre the story, the more correctly Rose answered the questions Collette posed to her. Collette believed that Rose’s final GRE score could be an interesting thing with her word pictures going at such a rate. Time would tell.
Later in the afternoon, Dad mowed the lawn and started a great bonfire in the backyard. Francis and Linnea, who were on spring break, dumped on bags of raked leaves and mown grass. Linnea made black cakes of wet potting soil on the patio in a large clam shell and Mom cleaned off the patio – all preparations for Easter. A large bumble-bee swarmed around Linnea as she made her cakes.
“Oh, hi, Bumble,” she greeted her old friend from the year before. “He’s back.”
“At the extreme end of the projections, a 7- to 9-degree average temperature increase, the chart predicts: “Up to one-fifth of the world population affected by increased flood events” … “1.1 to 3.2 billion people with increased water scarcity” …”major extinctions around the globe.”
Despite that dire outlook, several scientists involved in the process say they are optimistic that such a drastic temperature rise won’t happen because people will reduce carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming.
“The worst stuff is not going to happen because we can’t be that stupid,” said Harvard University oceanographer James McCarthy, who was a top author of the 2001 version of this report. “Not that I think the projections aren’t that good, but because we can’t be that stupid.””
– more from CNN (regarding global warming)