Post 8.2.6.0 Current Events: Writing Group, Back from Christmas, DIL Cytology Certificate

I'm back in Stockton and at the Empresso again.  The rumor is true, it IS cold in Minnesota in the winter.  The cold and the Minnesota comments are a comment about my recent visit to Beloved Son and Daughter in Law in Rochester MN. She's taking a one year certificate class in Cytology at the Mayo Clinic. He's working from home, doing IT management for an engineering company with offices around the world.

I got a behind the classroom tour of the Mayo Clinic.  The cytology classes get to look into microscopes that are tube and mirror connected to the instructor's microscope, so that students can see what she sees, or a mirror image of it.  Each iteration reverses for the six slaves, three on each side.  Mirror, same, mirror, right and mirror, same, mirror left.

The stains used to make collected epithelial cells turns the new ones blue and the old ones pink.  They look pretty on the slide.   Suitable for fabric. 

I asked my Daughter in Law, who was giving me a tour and who was showing me a stack of slides, whether she would use such cloth for nursery curtains.  She said no.  Gave me the evil eye.  Well, not exactly evil.  The exasperated and endlessly disapproving eye.  She's had practice with it.  Has it on speed dial when she knows she'll be talking to me.  Sees it as necessary protection. 

She doesn't want to risk starting to think of me as normal.  She also doesn't want to risk me thinking that she might accept any suggestion that I might make.  Well, not ANY suggestion.  If I were to make a Normal Suggestion, she would be amiably ready to consider it.  It's not that she intends to be unreasonable or protective, it's just that my ideas are so likely to be odd, from her point of view. 

I prefer whimsical.  She prefers Dammit Woman, where do you come up with these weird things?  No offense meant.  She is pleased to be honest and upfront and spirited.  It does keep misapprehensions to a minimum.  I'm nearly used to it.

Are you crazy?  I mean, I love you dearly, but, damn.  That is some industrial grade crazy.  Normal people don't think of things like that.

She trained the middle boy to keep the apartment clean, including doing dishes more than once a day.  That is so much fun to watch that I would forgive a lot more than a loud statement of things I know that other people are often thinking.  I'm an acquired taste.  That's one of the benefits I have noticed to having children.  Children, being raised around you (general you - One), become contaminated by you (one) and for at least a handful of years think you're normal. 

As long as you don't try saying or implying that everyone else out there is abnormal and wrong, they'll tend to at least stay indulgent to your (one's) idiosyncrasies.   I've learned to appreciate that.  (I'll tell you about Parental Arbitrariness, sometime.)