A Bunsen Burner Adventure OR I am secretly Mario

Okay, so like I mentioned yesterday, here's the Bunsen burner story from high school. It was 12th grade physics. I don't remember our exact lesson, but we were doing a lab that involved heating up an alcohol solution using a Bunsen burner. Since alcohol solutions sitting directly over flames is generally a bad idea, the test tube was sitting in a beaker of water over the flames.

Kind of like this, but fewer scales, more liquids, and more fire.

So imagine that we're standing at the workstation and the picture here is the actual test tube/beaker/Bunsen burner concoction. To our right is the walkway between work stations and the rest of the classroom and to our left is the sink. There were some pieces of equipment around that we would need to wash later, but we were just starting the experiment. Also, my notebook is in between the sink & burner, because science.

My lab partner is at the teacher's desk getting supplies for the experiment and she's towards the back of a little bulge of people. At this point, we're getting the alcohol solution heated up, so I'm at the bench. For one reason or another, I think "you know, I don't want to get my notes wet when we're washing test tubes. I should move my notebook", even though we were just starting the experiment and nothing had really been dirtied. So, I moved my notebook from the left side of the burner to the right (away from the sink).

I know that my memory may have become distorted since this did happen in high school, but not a minute later, a fireball the size of my fist erupts from the test tube and volleys itself to the left of the burner by the sink - right where my notebook had been!

I quickly blew the tiny flames on the counter out and my teacher very calmly explained from across the room "You should have used a hot water solution, not a boiling one". Since my lab partner had taken a while, I had indeed let the water in the beaker boil over, which created enough of a heat fluctuation to ignite the alcohol.

Fortunately, everything turned out alright. I think we were even able to get a new solution and complete the experiment without any incident. This story sticks out because (1) I spawned a fireball I am Mario (2) if I didn't have that random notion of moving my notebook, the fireball would have landed on the notebook dead and center. Call it what you will, but something beyond myself triggered and prevented something worse from happening. So yeah, that's the Bunsen burner story.

It's April today... when did that happen? There's a lot of various holidays today. National Walking Day, St. Stupid Day (yes apparently that's a thing), Paraprofessional Appreciation Day, and of course, April Fool's Day. There weren't any major pranks that I was a part of today, either giving or receiving. I thought an Associate Dean was going to RickRoll based on an email he sent a committee I'm in, but the video link was actually relevant to our group. I did appreciate that the program we use for judicial business (Maxient) had a "MaxPaper" feature which would let you print off loose-leaf paper with the Maxient header since stylish things go in and out of style in cycles. Also, take some time to play Pac-Man on Google Maps.

DFTBA