Random things I've learned in the past few days

I'm not taking classes right now, but that doesn't prevent my keen sense of acumen from acquiring knowledge from my surroundings. For example:

1- If one adds water to magnesium chloride powder, it creates an exothermic reaction and gets really hot. This is normal and should not be a cause of panic.

2- Rolling up one's pant legs when walking to school in a thunderstorm can keep one's pants much drier.

3- Reading to make oneself sleepy right before bed at night is all very well until one falls asleep while reading and drops one's book on oneself, waking oneself back up.

4-Glass is a most amazing compound. It can retain heat for an impressive length of time, and yet not conduct the heat within itself very well at all. It's like it is selfish for heat, and it doesn't want to share it and it holds on to it as long as possible. I learned this while I was heating up glass rods in the flame of a bunsen burner in order to both sterilize them and get them hot enough to bend them into "L" shapes. If it were a metal rod I had been holding in the flame, there's no way I could have held the other end of it without severely burning myself. But holding one end of a glass rod while sticking the other in a flame does no damage to the hand that holds the cool end. Fascinating.

5- Also, skirt #1 is successfully completed on the new sewing machine! I had a minor mishap with an enthusiastic pair of scissors and an uneven waistline that led to the demise of a zipper, but a new zipper was purchased and inserted into the skirt, and I have hopefully learned the lesson that one should always check to make sure that one side of the waistline isn't higher than the other before trying to add zippers or facings to skirts and pants. *sigh*