Today I wrote my new critical/ethical thinking class, this week on the topic of Light and Darkness. This is a sort of mish-mash of different concepts only linked by their relationship to light and darkness. I touch on fear of the dark, artificial lighting and the fact humans do stuff at all hours of the night, light pollution, creative uses of light and darkness, health and environmental effects, and some speculative what-if questions like, “What if the world had no night time?” and the opposite, “What if there was no daytime?” (assuming enough warmth that we wouldn’t just freeze).
I had the first class tonight and it went pretty well, despite having just one student this time. So at least I have enough questions!
I cooked pizza for diner, and used the warm oven to bake some chocolate chip cookies afterwards. I’ve made cookies many times, but they always spread out very flat and semi-merge into one another. I found recently that the secret to avoiding this is to chill the dough before baking, so it doesn’t have as much time to flow in between being put into the oven and setting firm. I’ve wanted to make cookies for a while to use up some carob powder and leftover choc chips, and had some time around lunch to make the dough and then set it in the fridge to chill for several hours before baking.
The cookies came out nicely! I decided to take a few on a paper plate over to our new neighbours as a mini housewarming gift, to welcome them to the building. While I was chatting with the woman at their threshold, I noticed that on the bookcase behind her were several board games: Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, and Azul among them. I mentioned my wife and I were into board games too, and said we’d have to invite them over for a games night some time. They both sounded keen.
I can ease them in with games like Kingdomino and Camel Up, before seeing how game they are for something complex like Root. And then of course I have to test the waters to see how they feel about roleplaying games… Maybe we’ve found a couple of new Dungeons & Dragons players!