The Scientific Experiment While Mom Was Gone

This evening I sat at the kitchen counter having hot chocolate with Emily. I looked up and on the ceiling I saw this:

Hmmm. I said some words about this and got this response:

Quote of the Day:
"What's so weird about little orange flecks on the ceiling?"
--the culprit

I was gone all day. A Methodist church in Florence, out on the coast, had invited me a long time ago to come speak today. Paul and I had decided to make a two-day anniversary expedition out of it and I looked forward to this very much.

However. Harvest almost didn't happen, as you know by now, and then it was really late, so there was no way Paul could come to the coast with me. So I took his mom instead and we made a day of it, and while it didn't have the ambiance of a 27th anniversary getaway, it was still fun, and we had a good time catching up on all the MennoValley news and eating at Mo's and talking with friendly Methodist women.

It turns out that while I was gone, someone did a scientific experiment. First he froze a can of orange pop. When it felt good and solid, he decided to peel off the can and have a nice slushy orange treat.

So he stabbed it with a "sharp cutter thing."

This was not such a good idea, we are told.

The culprit and Emily did a lot of scrubbing and spraying and wiping, but after I came home I still kept finding funny little orange dots on the fridge, the bar, the wall, my notebook on the table, and probably lots of other places that I am sure to discover in time.

And then I saw them on the ceiling.

So this happened:
The culprit explained the scientific process of the experiment to his dad, ending with,

2nd Quote of the Day:
"But apparently carbon doesn't freeze very well, and so . . . [shrug] it exploded."

And somewhere in there he sighed and said,
3rd Quote of the Day:
"Life at the Smuckers, where every time a fly flaps a wing it has to go on the blog."

All I can say is, eat your heart out, Esta, my fine young friend who wants a whole houseful of this sort of son.