I met Dawn at 8:10 at Sam’s to do food shopping; we chose that time instead of 8:00 as we wanted to sleep in.  Shopping was easy, a fact that Dawn attributed to there being no Scouting professional present so every question of “A or B” was answered with “the better one, we’re worth it”.  I quickly racked up $800 in groceries and when I found that they only accepted debit I had to log into my ING account via my phone to move the cash to the correct place.

OfficeMax was out of the toner cartridges I needed only having the $150 high capacity versions.  I yelled in my head, bought the cartridges with the intent of buying replacements online and returning those.  Printing was done and I found my dad removing the non-return valves from the rocket rigs.  He said he was trying to reduce resistance, I said it was going to just force water into the base, he said he was going to put the return valves back in.

I arrived at 12:30, about 45 minutes later than I wanted and the parking lot already had about 40 cards in it.  Registration continued for a little over an hour and we started at about 2:00 with the Mentos+Diet Cherry Pepsi rocket.  The following conversation happened about six times:

Parent: Do you use diet because of the aspertame doing something?
Me: No, sucralose would do the same thing as would regular.  Diet isn’t sticky.
Parent: Does the cherry add anything?
Me: It’s what I had in my house.

The rotations were uneventful and the 10 minute break for a snack was appreciated.  The next evening activity was my science demonstration of which the magnus opus was making little clouds using dry ice, water, and soap.  I made a few dozen softball-sized bubbles and we tried putting them on different surfaces to see what would happen.  They figured out that temperature was unimportant and that texture and material was more important and I was quite proud.  This faded when kids started popping the bubbles by licking them where they then observed that “CO2 tastes like soap”.  Little Einsteins.

The final learning moment involved the cardboard oven pizzas, where a foil-lined boxed served as an oven.  After several boxes caught fire we had to issue the reminder “do not put the charcoal in the oven until it’s no longer flaming”, then all worked well.  The day was done and no one died.