Circuitry, Clarinets and More Guns

I’m proud to say that I’m the only one who got all of the circuitry questions right on our homework assignment from last week! At least for one night, it went from “Holly? You have a funny look on your face. Do you understand?” to “Holly, why don’t you tell everyone the answers.” And while I’m really happy that I understand the concepts of voltage, amperage and resistors, I’m not counting my chickens or anything. I still don’t know how a car works--what happens when you put the key in the ignition. But the circuitry works for me. I understand the formulas used to work the problems and it’s a matter of plugging in numbers where they belong.

I understand it like I understood playing the clarinet in middle and high school: I was good at it--I knew how to sight-read and where to put my fingers and how long to hold each note. But what I couldn’t do is make my own music without notes on paper to show me how--to create music from scratch. The jump from notes to art just didn’t work. In doing my circuitry homework over the weekend, there’s a fault somewhere in my jump from drawings on paper to questions like: “A vehicle has four parking lights all connected in parallel and one of the bulbs burns out. Technician A says that this could cause the parking light circuit fuse to blow (open). Technician B says that it would decrease the current in the circuit. Which technician is correct?” These questions require me to transfer something I’m confident of on paper into a weird, unknown universe where I’m not sure what I’m doing.

So, darlings, I got a lot more to learn.

More conversations in the classroom
The Mumbler: “Here comes Holly with her favorite sweater.”
Me: “Hey -- I made this sweater!” I’m very proud of my sweater.
The Mumbler: “I would never have the patience to do something like that.”
All-American: “What’s that?”
Me: “Knitting?”
All-American: “No, patience. What’s patience?”
Jiffy: “Patience is not getting frustrated and getting out your shotgun when you’re fishing.”

I can’t make this stuff up.