Wow, I can't quite believe today is the last day of classes. (And I don't even really *teach*, it's presentation-day in both so I listen to and grade students on their presentations). That's how semesters often are - you're running like crazy, and then suddenly, bam, it's over.

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I wish I had had knitting with me yesterday. Our internet did wind up going down again, and I wound up sitting for nearly 2 hours while my student took her early exam. (I did read most of a book on plagues, and learned that Jenner was actually not the first with smallpox preventative - he perfected vaccine, using cowpox, but prior to that, there was inoculation, using scabs from smallpox victims. Inoculation gave the person a weak case of smallpox but apparently everyone recovered. It was developed in Turkey and spread out from there. (This would have been the early 18th century)

Cotton Mather was among the advocates of inoculation. As was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (who had herself survived smallpox - she was left scarred and without eyelashes - and she lost a brother to it).*

There were a lot of people opposed to both inoculation and later, vaccination. Some on the grounds that it was too dangerous to put such a foreign substance into the body (which I think is still part of the anti-vaccine platform today), but others who said things like, "Smallpox is God's way of keeping the population down" (Ugh. I think God is smart enough and compassionate enough to find a less painful way) or that people deserved to suffer from smallpox, as it was simply one of the prices humanity had to pay for sin. (I doubt that many of the anti-vaccine folks espouse that today, though I suppose some might).

(*I wonder if perhaps some of my own feelings in favor of vaccination - particularly for things like polio - are colored by having talked to older relatives and people I went to church with, who raised children during the "polio summers" and hearing about their fears and also about the children who caught it and died.)

So then again, maybe it wasn't so bad I didn't have knitting with me. (Though I can and do knit and read).

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Last night was the annual AAUW Christmas party. I made a barbecued sweet and sour meetball recipe that I got out of Cook's Country (unfortunately recipes are only available to subscribers for copyright reasons, but I will say it's a good magazine). They were pretty good.

I was reminded, when I was cutting up the onion for the sauce, of something my friend Dorothy (who passed on last fall) said to me - this was very shortly after I had moved here - I was helping fix Youth Supper (ah, that was back in the days before the congregational split, back when there were more than enough volunteers for everything). I was cutting up onions, in my typical way - cut them in half, then cut thin slices one direction, turn the onion 1/4 turn, cut thin slices perpendicular to the first set, and then slice up from the bottom of the onion (x, y, and z axes, I suppose)

She looked at me and said, "You cut onions that way because you are a scientist."

And I responded, "No, I cut onions this way because that's how my mother taught me to." And she kind of chuckled.

I still cut onions that way because I don't like big chunks of onion in stuff and so I prefer to do the tiny little dice. And there is something that does please me about the orderliness of cutting an onion in the way I do (so maybe I do cut onions in that way partly because I am a scientist).

I still kind of miss Dorothy.