I’d hoped to get a lot of painting done this weekend. Saturday morning, I sat on my balcony in a sports bra and pajama pants, painting in a balmy 68 degrees. Today, it’s only 61 degrees and the thunder-sounding wind keeps rolling. I’ll bundle up and brave the weather to put a few dabs of paint on the canvas before my thin blood and fingers give up.
The last time the temperature dropped this quickly, we were graced with a two-hour delay due to “thunder sleet,” which sounds as if it should be an anime character. I even mused with one of my Physics classes last week about such a character being drawn by one of them. The next morning when I checked their assignments, I saw that one of my students, who is has excellent drawing abilities, sketched out a brute-nosed ThunderSleet character. That class even mused what ThunderSleet’s powers would be. I suggested he could make thunderbolts of ice, but not in form of a hammer like Thor.
Some students made other suggestions about ThunderSleet’s superpowers, but I had to end the off-task conversation and return to reviewing thermodynamics vocabulary. And what inspired the mentioning of thunder sleet to begin with? The benign discussion of the differences among three different temperature scales: Celsius, Fahrenheit, and Kelvin. And out popped a superhero. Perhaps one day, I’ll read about his adventures in a former student’s comic book.